|
|
Post by K1power on Oct 4, 2014 10:31:09 GMT 1
+1. I need a lot more me-time, rather than meh-time.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 9, 2014 19:05:20 GMT 1
Olli Rehn's latest:
Yup, still parroting the long-discredited voodoo nonsense, still using such a term as "restored competitiveness" as if it meant anything at all. Hell, it does mean something, but that something is straight-up POVERTY. And I didn't know "empirical" means coming-out-of-my-ass.
No one dismissed those "achievements" only "because they are only small states." Classic putting-my-words-into-your-mouth tactics there. It's telling that people like him never, ever mention emigration in any of their economic "analyses". As I've said countless times, if France had to emulate what Latvia and Ireland did, literally millions of French people would have to move to other countries to look for jobs. And I'm 120% sure that if France were to tell him that it would become a tax haven for US/global corporations like Ireland, he would never approve it.
The economies of both Ireland and Latvia are shit now anyway, unless your sole economic measuring stick is the interest rates of sovereign bonds.
And we've come so far that he's now telling you that Spain, with 24% unemployment rate, is a model for you to follow.
Need I say more. Seriously, the way the likes of Rehn manage to get away with openly insulting our intelligence, like we are really, really, REALLY a bunch of fuck-tards, is quite remarkable.
These neoliberal destroyers of Europe, most of whom seem to seriously think that their monumental fuck-up has been SUCCESS (!!!), still hold a firm lock on EU politics. They do most of the job for the Germans, who are pretty much a lost cause as that idiotic, destructive economic model has literally become their religion. They are frantically cutting their budget while infrastructure crumbling, and investment drying up, just because. They will never ditch that suicidal stupidity, and will continue to try to lock the entire currency zone inside that deadly cage.
Almost all the economic fundamentals in the euro zone are going to shit. Investment down, inflation waaaaay down ever so close to deflation, unemployment pretty much stuck high up there, etc. In an aging society that hasn't yet faced the real effect of aging, to boot. What the fuck do they think will happen upon the effect really starting to kick in, when it's already acting like an old man zombie-walking?
It's a continent-wide economic experiment going to shit in front of our eyes. It's been years since the financial meltdown now, and the horror story is still ongoing. It's getting worse, with most of the people not even fully realizing it. It's an appalling man-made long-term disaster.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 10, 2014 19:42:20 GMT 1
I tolerated those aggressive "atheists" for a long time, but really, their utter idiocy has become too much for me to overlook.
Richard Dawkins has been demoted to the joke celebrity category in Britain (he, being a fucking clown, has no one but himself to blame for that), but Bill Maher still seems to have a lot of influence over the "liberal" types in the US. I have no idea what they see in that contrarian pothead, but that's the sad reality.
A week or so ago, he accused Obama of being "too soft on Islam" while being hard on the American Right. He's obviously not a big fan of the Right, but I guess the point is that he thinks there is some kind of imbalance in how Obama deals with Islam and the American Right.
Sheesh.
When will these "liberal" Islamophobes stop talking out of their asses? If Islam is as "backward" and "anti-liberal" as they claim, how do they explain to me the fact that countries like Indonesia and Pakistan (and others), huge Muslim countries, have had female heads of states, something that the "liberal" US of A has yet to achieve? FYI, Indonesia is 10 times as big as Saudi Arabia population-wise. That's a lot of Muslims, and all the Indonesians that I know are far more pleasant human beings than Bill fucking Maher.
I guess their "Islam" starts with ISIS, goes through Islamic Iran, stops by at Al Qaeda HQ, and ends with Saudi Arabia. That's pretty much the entire Muslim world in their imagination. Never mind that's only a tiny part of it in reality.
I don't know what kind of brownie points Maher is trying to win by winking to the American Right that way, but it's just a fact that the vast majority of Muslims are very clearly saner than the majority of the American Right. There's no "imbalance" in Obama's general stance. What the fuck does he want Obama to say about Islam? "Burn the Qu'ran because it's a crazy book"?
Bill Maher is just yet another "straight-shooter" who somehow thinks exposing his dick around is akin to intellectual honesty. That's just one definition of "reactionary" in fact, and it's always a path to bigotry whatever they "mean". The conservatives/Right don't have a monopoly on that shit, and he is one clownish piece of evidence. A fucking idiot, and a fucking huge source of headache for atheists like me. It just drives me crazy that total clowns like him try to represent us.
|
|
|
|
Post by Jofeljoh! on Oct 14, 2014 7:59:42 GMT 1
When will these "liberal" Islamophobes stop talking out of their asses? If Islam is as "backward" and "anti-liberal" as they claim, how do they explain to me the fact that countries like Indonesia and Pakistan (and others), huge Muslim countries, have had female heads of states, something that the "liberal" US of A has yet to achieve? FYI, Indonesia is 10 times as big as Saudi Arabia population-wise. That's a lot of Muslims, and all the Indonesians that I know are far more pleasant human beings than Bill fucking Maher. Well, an explanation of that is given here: www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/10/05/reza-aslan-is-wrong-about-islam-and-this-is-why/if you question the motives of Bill Maher, maybe this piece might help, from a perspective of an ex-muslim. Also, I'm very much against the term 'islamophobia'. That's not to say that there isn't a (probably large) group of bigots that are very much opposed against muslims, but this term has been thrown around far too much at people with legitimate criticism against islam. I very much side with the likes of Bill Maher, Sam Harris, etc (I'm sorry miscmisc, am I an aggressive atheist now?  (I hope we still can be online friends  )) www.patheos.com/blogs/marginoferr/2014/10/12/bill-maher-is-no-bigot/www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/10/maher-harris-aslan-affleck-kristof-an-atheist-reformist-iranians-view/ |
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 15, 2014 22:58:19 GMT 1
Like I said, what they "mean" is not important at all. I'm familiar with their "nuanced" arguments, but they mean absolutely nothing to me. They all boil down to historical ignorance and self-righteous indulgence, no matter how many links you throw at me. The problem is far more fundamental than those specific points. I'm fully aware that the "female head of state" shit isn't good enough to win the debate. But I hope you get my point: they think they are more sophisticated than that, but they aren't. That's about the level where they are hovering. I see them the same way I see my 21-year-old relative, an ignorant Yale junior who seems to think that he knows everything about the world, minus kinship affection.
Look, the whole idea of us having to pick a side between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck regarding one huge group of people, one huge diverse culture, is absurdity of highest order. Neither of the two clearly is aware of any history regarding religion to begin with. I'm pretty sure that they haven't read any Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard etc. Only plenty of dumbshit stuff written by clueless assholes, probably.
The most important point is this: the problem is actually the "debate" itself, which means Affleck is an accomplice even if he defends Islam. I take NEITHER side. Both of them should just fuck off and stay clear. They have no idea what they are getting themselves, and ultimately all of us, into. It's waaaay over their intellectual midget heads.
For one, it's always that kind of sophomoric posturing that leads to bigotry bursting out. History is choke full of such cases. Time and time again, the ones who started it claim that they were simply "rationally" trying to discuss the subject matter (which is almost always a lazily defined monolithic entity like "Islam", "Japanese", "Africans" etc). That's always the same old cop-out, and if they were ignorant of what kind of shit their "courageous stance" could and would lead to, that simply means they are self-righteous idiots, often worse than straight-up bigots. No better than self-righteous religious nuts.
Even Nazism was no exception. While you had primitive Jew-haters on one hand, you also had "intellectual debates" regarding Judaism on the other hand. Most people only know about Mein Kampf, Rosenberg's vile publications and stuff like that, but they belonged in the "primitive" side of it. There was a LOT more than that. You'd be shocked if you read what kind of stuff more "rational" pseudo-intellectuals were talking about regarding Judaism and Jewry, not because it was nakedly vile, but because it would surely remind you of what the likes of Maher are saying about "Islam" today. They tapdanced around the question of what to actually do with Judaism and Jews, but as we all know, the other "primitive" side took care of that part. Most of the former went scot-free after the war because they didn't make the mistake of advocating anything concrete, and no doubt most of them never thought of actually annihilating Jews in their wildest imagination, but those two sides ideologically worked hand in hand to reinforce the general bigotry against Jews.
You may think I'm unfairly bringing up an extreme case, but the basic structure is the same: The firm presence of deep-seated prejudice in the society at large - check; Pseudo-intellectual debates that pretend to have nothing to do with it, yet nonetheless inevitably amplify it - check.
Maher seems to think it's so easy to pseudo-deconstruct a religion in such a juvenile way with no horrible consequences, but that's absolutely to be expected from someone who thinks the Israel-Palestine relationship is akin to that between a reasonable husband (Israel) and hysterical wife (Palestine). His pride in crusading against religions takes priority over facts, obviously. That's what makes him a dick waver instead of a rational commentator. He's a fucking libertarian after all, wearing the badge of college-dweeb pothead idiocy. Libertarians proudly don't care about history.
So, my question to you is: what exactly do you want? It's fine if you want to express your feeling toward the things that you don't like about Islam, but that shouldn't require you to support the likes of Maher, who seem to be on a much bigger mission than that. You surely don't think all it takes to secularize Muslims is try to "reason with them", do you? You might live in a secular culture now, but your continent was half-secularized almost entirely thanks to millions of dead bodies, aka a series of (geo)political mayhem and atrocities, and not because of any kind of "reasoning". It's just a historical accident. Europeans did not suddenly wake up to the fact that there is no God. I repeat: it's just an accident that you live in a largely secular society today. Enlightenment is vastly overrated by most people. Not by historians, though.
Besides, it's not like Muslims are on top of the world oppressing the rest of us. It's largely Muslims that do the dying these days. Religion is usually a way to get even with the world. It's an inner revenge to the world that you perceive is hostile to you. Religion gives you the ultimate card, the ultimate superiority, of being chosen by Him/going to Heaven/etc. It's a deeply psychological matter, and pointing out its absurd aspects (there are plenty of them, of course) in such a confrontational way only provokes them to double down, obviously. In other words, it doesn't do anyone any good. Solutions to religious problems almost always come from outside religion. Sure, to be fair, frank debates can have some merits if done on individual basis, but the kind of a grand "debate" over "Islam" (or "Christianity" or whatever else) that Maher and Co. are trying to get us into is the last thing that we need in this world. It's nothing but a bunch of clueless kids poking the ants nest, with no care in the world about the consequences. I hope you are aware that "Obama is too soft on Islam" is a highly political statement, and that you know what a "political statement" means in the real world. If you agree with him on that, you have to define what kind of political actions would constitute "not too soft". I can only think of horrendous ones, and out-of-this-worldly stupid ones.
I do hope you won't take the Hitchens path. That was the dead end. He was the living proof of that. But his war/conflict-mongering was in fact a natural consequence of the dead-end cult ideology that he, Amis (<-- garbage writer), Rushdee and others shared. There was no other way left for him in the end. It's not even an irony that he ended up sounding exactly like a real crusading knight from the Holy War days.
|
|
|
|
Post by Jofeljoh! on Oct 16, 2014 7:49:18 GMT 1
Now hold on; I only addressed two specific things in my post: 1) about the heads of muslim countries, explained by two ex-muslims. Now you can disagree with them, and maybe they are talking out of their asses as well, but they seem pretty nuanced to me. You asked for an explanation, I just provided one 2) about the term of islamophobia being thrown around. I really feel that is the case. And no matter how well read you are or what a sopisticated thinker someone is, whenever there is genuine critique on islam, rather than muslims as people, being labeled as an islamophobe is an instant conversation ender and actually I think it's rather intellectually dishonest to do so. No one accuses you of being a christianophobe if you criticize that religion for example. I specifically said that I side with them on THAT point, and although I agree with them on many other points as well, I said nothing about those points. To be clear: I also disagree with Maher an Harris about other things. (Maher for instant is an infamous anti-vaccin nut. With Harris I disagree about gun control/policy for example). Now the format of the show of Bill Maher not really suits such a discussion, nor (arguably) the guests. Although I question then; when are people qualified for this debate? I also doubt that Maher or Affleck have read those philosophers, although I know Harris has (he referenced both Kierkegaard and Spinoza before, he also has a degree in philosophy, if that matters. And you might disagree heavily whith Hitchens, you cannot say he wasn't well read or familiar with the works of philosophers or didn't have any knowledge about politics in the world). Now I'm not even pretending to be an expert in the field. Although I'm always trying to know more about the subject, reading books, reading the opinions of possibly every side of the story. It's hard. When I listen to so-called experts/scholars like Reza Aslan, seeing him distorting the views of his opponents, it saddens me. Here's someone who is supposed to be knowledgeable about his field, but really has some shady debate-antics. |
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 22, 2014 9:23:54 GMT 1
It was probably not a good reply to what you specifically said, but you know my style in this thread by now. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say what I wanted to say, lol.
Just one thing, though:
That's precisely what made him worse than most others. He knew all the rhetorical techniques to tapdance around the fact that he was nothing more than one of those pathetic left-turned-right contrarian attention seekers. He didn't have the guts to say "Yes, I'm just like Irvin Kristol, in fact much worse than him because he was at least somewhat original and was basically saying what I'm saying now way, way earlier than I, and thus there is virtually no difference between me and the neocon graduate students studying political science at the University of Chicago. Got a problem with that?" No one should wonder why the worst kind of American elites hearted him so much, because it's obvious. He won even more brownie points due to his anti-religion view, as those elites found the neocon gurus, all of whom are atheist yet embraced religion as a necessary "tool" to build a stable society to the point where they were willingly allied with the Christian Right, too ruthlessly pragmatic for their liking. And of course his dislike of female intellectuals. That was a huge bonus for the particular kind of American elites.
He quoted Enlightenment thinkers heavily to justify his contrarian bullshit. I don't even know how many times he abused those thinkers for his convenience. According to him, the people "who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery" fail to understand that it is "the way that history is made, and to complain about it is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic shift." The annihilation of the Native Americans left "humanity on a slightly higher plane than it knew before," inaugurating an "early boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation" - channeling the spirit of a typical British imperial officer mourning the decline of his Empire in the early 20th century. And he invoked the likes of Hume, Locke and Kant for that shit. Criminal.
He put Iraq War on that ridiculous Clash of Civilizations map, and never apologized for any of the abhorrent things that he had said. He actually went to Iraq and wrote horrific columns day after day, fancying himself as a character in Apocalypse Now. Then he pulled that childish stunt against waterboarding by trying it himself, declaring, "Yes, this is torture!" Facepalm moment.
This guy basically never dared to challenge actual power and spent his energy instead on despising the weak. That tendency got worse as he got famous in the US, unsurprisingly. He found the American audience much easier to deal with than the British one. If you call Kissinger "one of the worst criminals in the history of humanity" and at the same time call America's endeavor in the Middle East a "noble act", you can't lose, right? You win both sides of the audience! Hooray!
In actuality, you are most likely to lose both if you are such an intellectual mess, but his Oxbridge accent got him through. Real shame, and that's why I've been going on and on about Americans being too susceptible to the British accent in this thread.
And his pathetic love affair with Margaret Thatcher, his "courageous" dissing of Mother Teresa, and Tony Blair... you have to stop me. I could go on forever and ever on this guy. "You might disagree heavily with Hitchens" is really an understatement. I'm actually glad that he's no more, pushing up the daisies. One of those "intellectuals" who were actually harmful to the world and many people's lives. Good riddance, and we live in a better world thanks to his early death.
And like I said before, he absolutely shouldn't mind me saying that; talking enormous shit about the dead was always his own schtick.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 23, 2014 10:16:18 GMT 1
It's that time of year again - the Eurozone bank stress tests!
The European Banking Authority is set to unveil the result on Sunday. As you know, these tests are largely cosmetic, even more so than their American counterparts. And they are exactly like doping tests which they told you months in advance that they will conduct, giving you plenty of time to arrange your "cycle" and stuff. In fact, the banks have spent the last several months doing almost nothing other than the prep work.
I expect 10-12 banks to "fail", tops. And the sacrificial lambs are most likely to be small-to-medium ones in countries like Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Italy etc. Maybe they will throw in an Austrian one, or even a German regional one to give you the impression of a little credibility. In other words, "safe" ones, impact-on-market-wise.
But what you have to pay attention to is not those failed banks, but the ones who only barely, marginally pass the tests. I would say more than half of the eurozone banks should fall in that category, and if the results aren't going to show that, just think of the tests as an even bigger joke than you expected.
I'm a tennis fan, and it's almost as if every single ATP tournament in Europe is sponsored by banks today. It's quite amazing. It wasn't like that at all back in the '90s. It's a small yet clear indication of how much of the "growth" over the last decade or so was simply a money-shuffling illusion. How the hell they will keep it up, I have no idea.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 28, 2014 0:54:08 GMT 1
Just as I thought, the "stress tests" turned out to be utterly stress-free for the banks, particularly for the big banks. They singled out 25 insignificant banks in insignificant locations, and let the big boys go scot-free. 25 is a bigger number than I predicted, but the devil is not in the head count, but in the total amount.
That is, now we are supposed to believe that the bank assets in the eurozone are overstated only by 48 billion euros, while the same report says that there is 879 billion euros in non-performing loans. In what world, you may ask, and the answer is no real world. In order for that number to be true, you must assume, among many other things, that Spanish banks have written off all the bad property loans. Total bollocks.
I think they've gone too far this time. Even in a normal situation, meaning a non-bubble situation, the shortfall of mere 48 billion euros would be suspect to say the least. And most of the major European countries are in or near recession as we speak. Even Germany is dangerously close. And the report doesn't mention deflation/disinflation even once as a factor to affect the health of the banking sector ahead. Absolutely useless, but understandable as bringing it into the equation would make the whole thing fall apart.
"Whitewash" is the word to describe it, and it was designed to make the German/French banks, the very visible gorilla in the room, look much healthier than they actually are. Hell, the capital shortfall of Deutsche Bank alone should exceed 48 billion.
Seriously, though, Deutsche Bank is basically a huge hedge fund with a commercial bank attached to it as side business. It really is. And "safe hedge fund" is an oxymoron. I'm very reluctant to call it a bank now. It's a German gambling machine that tries to cheat whenever it's lost big.
And Credit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, ING Groep, UniCredit, Commerzbank etc. - these big banks are drowning in massive piles of loans that are worth zero cents in reality. 48 billion is absolute peanuts compared to their worthless pieces of paper combined.
So, yup, it's a joke, and it's rigged. But then, the Market is an even bigger joke, and that's why those Eurocrats think nothing of insulting our intelligence this way over and over again. Europe is still absolutely overbanked, by far the most overbanked continent in the history of humanity, and that reality won't ever go away unless they actually do something serious about it.
|
|
seese
Rookie Member
Posts: 26 
|
Post by seese on Oct 28, 2014 14:51:22 GMT 1
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 31, 2014 11:41:38 GMT 1
LOL @ "The broad downturn in inflation and the repeated downward revisions to the inflation forecast imply that underlying inflationary pressures are very low and lower than previously assessed." I don't even know how many times Riksbank has uttered "lower than expected/assessed" over the last 12-24 months. Lower than expected by whom? Certainly not by me, certainly not by Lars Svensson, whom the conservative ponces at Riksbank ridiculed and kicked out. To think that those people tried to actually increase the interest rates not so long ago. Tough times for sane people, I'm telling you. Sweden is already in deflation. And it's pretty much irreversible. Time for the central bankers, bureaucrats and politicians to study Japan rigorously, but somehow I doubt they will. |
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 31, 2014 12:05:10 GMT 1
I watched All the President's Men, a great movie about Watergate Scandal, for the n-th time, and found it very underwhelming. I used to enjoy watching it, but not anymore apparently.
The problem is that the phrase "Who gives a shit?" inevitably echoes inside your head as you watch the film. Nixon bugged the Democrats. Yeah, and who gives a shit?
Of course, you must give a shit. That's illegal, and Nixon turned out to be a crook, a horrible person. But who remembers what happened after Nixon's fall? Does anyone even remember all the illegal shit done by the CIA (and FBI) that was exposed by the post-Watergate investigations? That was even worse than Watergate, and in fact many even believed that the agency would be no more soon enough. But Ronald Reagan pulled the plug on that, and the whole mess was effectively buried.
And now, we know that the CIA bugged the US Senate. They did shit like impersonating staffers, hacking into its computers, etc. Just take a breath and think about this: They bugged the US Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to oversee them. And the White House is doing its best to cover the CIA's ass.
What is worse, few seem to give a shit.
So, Nixon bugged the Democrats, bugged Kissinger, even bugged himself. He was nuts. But so what? If you don't even care about the implication of agencies like the CIA being completely above the law, why should you ever care about Dick Nixon's paranoia and his boys' amateur job at Watergate HQ and elsewhere?
Strange times we live in.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Oct 31, 2014 12:26:42 GMT 1
It seems that Ukraine is almost exactly taking the path that I expected it would. What a political mess, on top of the economic clusterfuck.
The oligarchs and elites mismanaged the country for 20 years, and after a brief interlude/pseudo-revolution, they are back in power, plus quite a few total neo-Nazis. Thank God there is always Russia to blame.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Nov 5, 2014 11:27:49 GMT 1
The Republicans won the midterm elections in the US, and I assume that the mainstream media will once again declare the "resurgence" of the GOP, "collapse" of the Democrats, and so on. If I were to appear on US TV and say that all the fundamentals clearly indicate the irreversible downward trend of the GOP, and not of the Dems, despite this "triumph", I would be labeled as some sort of a desperate liberal fool. Even though that's the truth.
It's really a circus. Over the last 100 years, a second-term President has lost Senate seats for his party in every single midterm election except one (1998), and has gained House seats for his party only on one occasion (1998, again).
So you really must look into the details: an enormous amount of unaccountable shadow money (e.g. one in seven ads for Mitch McConell in Kentucky was sponsored by "Kentucky Opportunity Coalition," which operates out of a P.O. Box in a strip mall); record-level dominance of old voters (37% of the voters were 60 or older), increasing dependency on the Christian Right and conservative white Baby Boomers, effort to disfranchise a staggering number of voters with vote ID laws, etc. The GOP threw a kitchen sink at the Dems in this election, and what have they won? A handful of key Senate & gubernatorial races by narrow margins, and a 3-4 seat Senate majority. They spent so much money and energy to simply repeat the midterm election tradition, barely beating a bunch of jokes like the Dems in those states.
And they will have to defend 24 seats in the next one.
Yawn.
|
|
|
|
Post by miscmisc on Nov 7, 2014 6:15:00 GMT 1
Let me gloat a little bit now. From NYT: OK, ISIS may not have really fizzled out yet. But you wonder what took the media guys so long to at least begin to have doubts on the hype... oh, wait, they are the ones who hyped it up like crazy. ISIS "won" many battles all right, but about anyone could beat that undisciplined, unmotivated joke of an army called the Iraqi Army. Hell, in many of those "battles", ISIS didn't even have to fire a gun once because no soldier was in sight when they arrived at the place. They used the ammo to shoot the local infidels instead. There was total political vacuum particularly in the Sunni area, and ISIS easily filled in. These cases were all well-documented, and you could find the info if you were willing to spend about half an hour on the internet. I explained more than a couple of times here the total infeasibility of a loud-mouthed hodgepodge group like ISIS actually occupying AND governing a large area for any extended amount of time, so I won't repeat it here. The worst thing about this course of events for ISIS is not really the defeats in battle themselves, but the impression that it gives to the potential recruits in Saudi Arabia, Paksitan, England, Canada, Germany, etc. Those foreign Muslim boys and converts decided to join the group largely because of the hype, much of which was created by the Western media. They got excited every time they heard the scary story about ISIS. Killing infidels in the name of Allah? Creating a New Caliphate? Having infidel women as sex slaves, gifts from Allah? And they are scaring the shit out of 'Murica and arrogant Eurofags! Cool! The group sounded like a total badass to them, and a total badass can't afford to lose the kool brand image for the kidz by looking like an inglorious loser. Tough days ahead for ISIS. |
|
