SergeantMatt

And your point is? I already said that neither group got their permits intending to observe them in good faith.  And for the record, Donward is completely correct when he observed that "with these type of events, there are literally dozens if not more "groups" which may or may not be talking to each other." I have enough experience with leftist organizing that I can say there will almost always be a small radical contingent that will go out of their way to break the rules of the permit on principle.  Cause permits are bad and wrong for some reason.  I don't know, it never made much sense to me and always seemed disrespectful to the people who organized the event and paid for the permit.
 
The bigger issue is that POTUS somehow felt it was necessary to point out that the Nazis had a permit.  Why would he do that?  What's the point, other than trying to create some sort of moral equivalence compared to the counter-protesters?  Every other President would have given a full-throated denunciation of White Supremacists.  Take Reagan for example.  This video clip will remind you what a president is supposed to sound like.  (I'm not a big fan of Reagan's policies, but damn, he was a good speaker and a likable personality)
 
 
Now, whether or not Reagan actually believed what he was saying is a different matter.  However, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  His visit to the SS cemetery at Bitburg was a pretty serious faux pas, although it seems rather quaint compared to the current POTUS.  

I'm pretty sure the permit held by the White Supremists did not include the right to drive cars into crowds or beat people with poles. Obviously, all sorts of things happened that were not within the scope of the permits issued.  I doubt anyone involved with either side applied for permits in good faith of following them.  
 
Just to be clear, here is my opinion regarding statues and antifa.  1) As President Trump himself said, the issue of whether a statue should stay or go should be made by local governments.  If a local government decides the public interest is better served by removing a statue, as they did in Charlottesville and Baltimore, than by all means, remove it.  2) White supremacists and other scum bags have a first amendment right to stage protests.  However, I think local governments also have the right to charge them for the extra security costs involved in providing for the public safety due to the well established pattern of disruption and violence caused by their rallies.  3) While I can sympathize with people wanting to violently counter white supremacists, I don't think it's a particularly productive tactic.  Based on my own experiences, it's better to organize an event at a different location promoting peace and unity, particularly if it involves some productive activity (cleaning a park, feeding people, etc).  Giving the nazi assholes a fight is actually what they want.  The last thing they want is to be ignored.  4) While I don't think the tactics of Antifa are very productive, I do not think one can draw a moral equivalence between them and Neo-Nazis.  One side is dumb, the other is evil.  There is a difference.
 
I remember back when I lived in Kalamazoo in the 90's, the Klan decided to hold a rally in the downtown park.  They city said fine, then erected so many chain link barricades in the name of public safety that the Klan rally was pretty much invisible.  Meanwhile, a public pick-nick was organized at a different park on the north side of town which attracted about twenty times the number of people as the Klan rally.  
 
If it were solely up to me, I would replace every confederate General statue with the statue of a country western singer.  So long General Lee, hello Willie Nelson.  See ya later Stonewall Jackson, good to see you Hank Williams.  I would take particular delight in replacing every monument to that old racist villian Nathan Bedford Forrest with a statue of Dolly Parton.
 
 

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to tell when he is lying and when he is just regurgitating what he has absorbed from watching Fox and Friends.  I guess he recently tweeted about General Pershing, referencing claims he made much earlier that Pershing had Filipino insurrectionists shot with bullets dipped in pigs blood and that this somehow magically ended radical Islamic terrorists for 35 years.  Frankly, he probably believes the story is true regardless of the fact that historians have roundly debunked it.  The weird thing about the story is that it doesn't even make any sense if you think about it.  Disrespecting your adversaries most dearly held religious beliefs is generally not a good strategy for getting them to calm down.  Just ask the British how it went with their Hindu and Muslim soldiers in India when they introduced a paper cartridge that was supposedly greased with pig and/or beef fat in 1857.

As to POTUS claims that the White Supremacists in Charlottesville had a permit while the counter protesters did not, here is the permit for the counter protesters.  And while this is hardly the biggest issue of concern for most people regarding last weekends events, it's example #183757373 of POTUS abilty to lie as easily as the breathes.  
 

I think it's more about how to the victims of the Confederacy (or their decedents) feel about it that's important these days.  Nobody asked black folk how they felt about these statues when they went up.  I'm sure they don't particularly enjoy being reminded of Confederate generals who fought for a movement whose primary motivation was the preservation of slavery every time they walk or drive past (assuming they know who the statue represents, Americans are shockingly historically illiterate, both black and white.)  If we really want to move forward as a society and be inclusive to all our citizens, we can find better and more positive subjects for our public monuments.  Lets leave Lee and Jackson in the museums where they belong.  ( I will admit that the Baltimore statue really is a very well done and attractive bit of sculpture.  I would not advocate destroying it, just relocating it to a more appropriate setting )
 
On a totally different note, the Russians have this fantastic statue that give tribute to the contributions of laboratory test rats.  
 

 
 

Oddly enough, for all those defending these confederate statues, Bobby Lee does not agree with you.

"As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that, however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt, in the present condition of the country, would have the effect of retarding instead of accelerating its accomplishment, and of continuing if not adding to the difficulties under which the Southern people labor."
 
Of course, Bobby Lee had a lot of weird ideas.  For one, he thought slavery was more harmful to white folks than black folks.  He also thought sending your army charging over open ground at an entrenched enemy would somehow work at Gettysburg, despite having seen what happened when Union forces did the exact same thing at Fredricksburg earlier that year.  
 

Confederate statues were erected in Baltimore in 1948, not a "mere generation after the war."  It is not a coincidence that these statues were put up at the same time as the Truman Administration was taking steps in the direction of integration and civil rights.  Baltimore was predominately Union territory with a large black population.  There was no reason to put up Confederate statues if the goal is to make former confederates feel included in society (they would have been all dead by 1948 anyway.)  However, confederate statues would be a good way to let the local black population know that a lot of white folks were not at all keen with them achieving any sort of equality.  
 
 

Yeah, the Lost Causers are the children and grandchildren of the Civil War era southern Democrats. I mean, here's how old the bastards who actually fought were by the 1890s:


 
These guys were retirees, practically.
 
Here's the thing, and they only sort of teach you think in school: We as a nation had achieved practically all the goals of the Civil Rights movement (for men, at least) by 1870. Black people were desegregated, they were free, they were voting, they were treated as equals... Because the Northern troops made the South do it at the barrel of a gun. And I don't mean "we fought a war", I mean there were literally Union troops stationed in the South, occupying it, pointing guns at the Southerners to make sure they guaranteed the rights of the Negro. 
 
And then the Compromise of 1877 happened, and the North just abandoned the Southern blacks. They just up and left, and everything they'd achieved to that point was lost. They don't drive this home in school like I think they should: The North failed to secure the rights of the Southern blacks at the end of the Civil War, and as a consequence the only thing that long and bloody conflict decided was whether states could secede or not. The whole reason there was a Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and '60s was due to that failure. The failure of Reconstruction is a shameful mark on our country, especially the Yankees, and I think that needs to hammered in to schoolchildren as such.
 
More optimistically, the Yanks seemed to have learned their lesson eventually, because they did not let the same thing happen in Japan and Germany after World War II. Which is why we still have large military bases in those countries.

Picked this up two days ago.
 

 
That final 1v1 had my heart pounding, last circle was basically on the side of a low hill with like two trees for cover.

Diehard Clintonista, MSNBC correspondent. Us Berniebros have been dealing with her shit since the primaries began.

The Democratic Party is basically screwed on a national level until the entire stunningly incompetent leadership gets purged (since they're not going to give up their grip on power willingly) and replaced with new blood.

The Democratic Party is basically screwed on a national level until the entire stunningly incompetent leadership gets purged (since they're not going to give up their grip on power willingly) and replaced with new blood.

Well, not getting any support from the national DNC, that's for sure.  But then, it's a fine line having to pretend to be progressive while still sucking up all those corporate dollars.  The modern Democratic party has all the charisma as your least favorite high school teachers.  

I'm radically left for this board.  I haven't seen anything but condemnation from my friends list about these attacks. Even people who are pretty far left of me have at worst said "I understand their anger, but not the right method to deal with it. If you ID them, toss them in jail."   I have seen a bit of "I told you so." from the radical anti-gun people I know.
On weapons, from what I've seen from actual friends?  Actually a bit more tolerance/willingness to explore, and a few exploratory requests for information from the folks I know. (Nate has been very helpful a couple of times at random moments, so he's a great firearms ambassador to the left... even if he doesn't know it.) , but also a bit of "They are armed, so we should be as well.", which honestly people try to shout down, but there is that undercurrent of somewhat sane people actually speaking up. I'll add that this particular line of commentary is based on friends in the US. Canada has a whole different deal going on.

I find it very interesting that FOX was 52% negative.  That is very telling to me. I'd have expected it to be higher in his favor.
Translation: Almost everyone agrees he's doing a shit job. FOX, the general source of  right wing whackjob 'news' is even slightly against him.
 
 
 
 

Bernie would have figured out how to use a crop tool on his stolen meme.

It's Tucker Carlson from Fox.  Being a prick is part of his shtick.  
 
Also, the name "Tucker" is a terrible fucking name.  
 
 

I like this explanation, but according to what you said this wouldn't game as a straight defect-defect outcome, as that implies that both sides lose worse than they would have by cooperation. Rather; the fuck-the-poor crowd has decisively won and everyone else has lost. They're the only party here that gets what they want, after all.
 
I don't know if there's a well-known model for this kind of three-way situation, to be honest. 

Ah, the 1980s. Either the best of economic times or the beginning of the end, depending on your view.
 
I'm not going to bash the CATO institute too much, because frankly all economics seems to be soft science and claiming positive effects of your favourite policy retrospectively seems to be pretty common throughout. But my abiding impression of the last decade is that you can have wonderful economic growth without it meaning a damn thing to people on the ground, and the mantra of cutting taxes to folk at the top of the income curve seems to be a great way to generate this effect. The related idea; that increasing inequality isn't a problem because the pie gets bigger faster than they can make your slice of it smaller, seems to be about as dead as the idea that putting all productive capacity in the hands of the state will lead to everyone getting a fair shake. 

That's assuming a total tax rate, which this sort of thing never is. You're never talking about taking X% of a rich person's total income, because rich people finances aren't anything like the rest or ours (their wealth is distributed across a whole range of entities and structures, nearly always across continents). Hell, you could tax your top three million at 100% of their reported income and most of them probably wouldn't notice, because their reported income doesn't even remotely resemble their actual wealth.
 
As for stifling the economy, do you really think that rich individuals are the engine of economic growth? Nah bro, the 19th century is over. Corporations and governments are, for better or worse, the main drivers of research, investment and growth in our economies.
 
Also capital != 'producer' in our modern economy, but that's a whole other subject.
 
To end on a constructive note, I'd say that my operating theory of how wealth works at the top end (and something which I've had some opportunity to observe first hand) is that enough money eventually catapults you outside the orbit of the real economy and into this weird zone where it becomes just raw numbers floating in the ether without being pegged to anything and grows according to its own rules. I think its fairly well understood at this point (by all sides) that one of the primary issues for capitalist economies is to work out how to bring this wealth back into the real world somehow. One approach is to try to encourage rich people to spend more themselves by taking the shackles off (deregulation, lower tax rates etc.) but my belief is that the gravetic pull of capital is just too strong for them to do this (ie: I agree with Piketty).
 
The other approach is to try to redirect wealth in some way to deflate this whole issue before it destroys the system its feeding off of. Which is where we get the idea of ultra-high tax rates for the top 1%. I'm abivalent on this approach, as it hasn't historically been very sustainable in the face of incentives and human behaviour. But, lacking a third way, its what we've got.

Even if I supported Trumps agenda, which I don't, I can't see how the first 100 days could be called a success.  Despite having a friendly congress he failed to get the Republican ACA replacement bill passed (although this might happen at some point), his executive orders regarding immigration were so poorly written that they have been blocked by federal judges and his approval ratings are historically low.  His foreign policy has been a series of mixed messages, causing concern to long standing allies.  His bombing of Syria essentially accomplished nothing other than to boost his poll numbers slightly.  And from what I have read, the lastest budget put forward by congress includes no funding for his wall.  And the daily drumbeat about allegations of collusion with the Russians, conflicts of interest, nepotism, and whitehouse in-fighting continue to fill the daily news.  Even getting his SOTUS nominee confirmed required the Senate modifying their own rules.  I suppose if you think massive deregulation of business is a good thing, you could chalk that up as a success for Trump.    
 
 

A completely unfalsifiable position that doesn't really care what is true and false is really cute, but completely worthless. 
 
If you come across something that actually debunks 150 odd years of science, let me know. 

15 times
Fuck that crowd then. 
Well there's a couple established ways the climate changes, with these 3 being the major global drivers of climate. 
solar irradiance orbital perturbations  atmospheric composition  Solar irradiance has, on the average, been fairly steady over the past couple decades 

The earth's orbit has been relative constant over in this modern era too and thus there's no reason to suggest that warming is caused by shifts in the earth's orbit. 
 
So that leaves atmospheric changes. Sulfate concentrations (which have a cooling effect and where behind the global cooling scare) are going down and GHGs are increasing in tune with temperature. 
 
In the past, solar irradiance & orbital changes were the triggers for climatic change with CO2 levels increasing following the initial warming and thus exacerbate that initial warming. Today we have an initial warming that isn't related to those things, but warming does match up with CO2 
 
They 
When the poles were ice free, yeah
That is why
Well, if you include the positive feedback loops, it gets really complex, but its also alarmist to talk about a runaway greenhouse effect. 
 
I used to be extremely skeptical of climate change a couple years ago. I changed my mind based on rebuttals I read. I had to agree with the I Fucking Love Science crowd, but they bumblefucked into being correct about something. 
 
By hating these idiots so much on every other issue, it must be impossible to accept that they can be right about something huh?