Trump: The Second Year

At no point did I make such an argument. That’s your bullshit strawman. Trump increased economic liberty without reducing other forms, which is more than I could have expected from HRC. But carry on micscharactarising my position, sophist.

My point was Trump was better for liberty than the only other human that had a chance of winning. That’s what we were arguing about, unless your position is now that you were merely trolling me by misstating my position.

They assaulted him first, which is okay. Verbal assault is a normal part of political discourse. Do I need to post the attack ads from 1800 again?

The Republicans tried nice for a long assed time (MCCain and Romney anyone?) Nice was a losing strategy, the Democrats taught them that. Republicans can’t get a fair shake in the press, ever. Attacking your enemy is a legitimate strategy. If the mainstream press has no integrity or standing with their customers to protect them from the nonsensical tweets of a senile old man, then it’s time for the press to change.

Your initial argument was that Trump was harming the press, thus reducing liberty. I pointed out that he was not using government means to do so, merely attacking them with words, and that freedom of speech goes both ways and that doesn’t constitute a reduction in liberty. Then I gave examples of what real state oppression of the press looks like, to draw a comparison to Trump’s mean tweets. That is not whataboutism, that is a reasoned argument.

Had I said “Obama threatened Hannity with physical harm that one time!” With no other argument, that would be textbook whataboutism.

Not my definition of liberty. Merely your bullshit strawman.

Mischaracterize → obfuscate → condescend

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2 news stories about passport denials on the 1st page of Google results for the search: “denied passports by year”. There was the post one and a fox news report with State’s rebuttal. Looks like way more get denied for taxes.

Yeah. That really doesn’t bother me.

Actual cases of a humanitarian nature take a different track anyways, so the people that really need to will get in and be safe regardless of what bureaucratic stonewalling they do for visas.

Not what’s going on at all, wrong side of the border, but thanks for stopping by :stuck_out_tongue:

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Edited out this comment–upon reflection, and once my dander was back in place, it was much more troll-y than I want to be. So I’ll bow out at this point, BG. The floor is yours if you want it.

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???

Please explain this one a little more, @Basement_Gainz.

Lower taxes = increased liberty because taxes = theft

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Wait, are you sure? Because that sounds like one of the rules people live by in the ghetto.

That would be an ancap answer sure. Most libertarians agree to pay some taxes for the essential/constitutional functions of government and that funds for vote buying, subsidies, corruption, nation building etc… are all theft.

If you’re a pleb like me and trade your time for money then every minute you work to pay taxes is time that isn’t yours. If you have to work until May or June to pay federal, state, local taxes… only half your work belongs to you. So you’re only a slave 50% of the time.

The regulatory rollback means businesses are compelled to act less.

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Trump is calling for libel laws to change. Hooray liberty!!!

Lol. Between this and the ‘state Dept cost me everything’ line I just can’t take this topic seriously. I’ma bow out now. Have a good un

Pardon my rough language but that wasn’t hyperbole. When you get a call from your wife at your day job that “there’s 5 federal agents here to see you.” it’s a life changing event. Long story short the bureaucrats at State changed how they interpret ITAR and EAR rules without notifying exporters. The new rules meant that 100% of my customers could no longer afford to import my products. In '13 we had gross sales of roughly $350k and were on track for $500k in '14. Then overnight, zero sales. Luckily I hadn’t quit my day job. I had to liquidate and that was an ugly drawn out process with a fair bit of my own money (all of it) used to prevent bankruptcy.

So forgive my crabby ramblings. I took risks and got my ass handed to me by something I didn’t see coming. Oh well.

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I’m surprised the state dept was able to get away with tanking the entire industry you were working in lol. Always good to hear an anecdote for why we need the compliance departments of the world.

Sorry about what happened though, the stats on owning a business aren’t amazing for a reason.

They reclassified our products from the “sporting goods” category to the “defense articles” category. So exporting our little reloading kits and hunting bullets went from a $25/shipment to State to $2500-$5000/shipment. We had to comply with the same rules as a company selling Israel a sidewinder missile.

That probably wouldn’t hurt someone selling $1M or more per shipment. But our average shipment for our smaller customers was $2k-$15k… Instadeath game over. There’s a reason they say regulations hurt small businesses more. Cost of compliance is a bitch.

They’re pretty good if you get big enough, which is why I’ll never go small biz again. Go big or go home.

Thanks btw.

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Stunning.

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Was that Mattis do you think? 25th amendment would be interesting at least.

I was initially going to say ‘no’–he seems to me too traditional, too deferential to the sanctity of the chain of command. But then I recalled that he is cited in the Woodward book as essentially disobeying a direct order from the president (to ‘kill people’ in Syria, including assassinate Bashar al Assad). So…Maybe he’s not so hidebound after all?

At any rate…It took, what, 40 years to find out the identity of Deep Throat? I suspect we’ll find out the identity of this individual in something closer to 40 hours.

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I just saw this story, and couldn’t resist:

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I know an individual who was at the NATO summit in Warsaw and was in a wider circle of NATO allied staff that interacted with Mattis among others and heard Trump speak.

Trump allegedly behaved like a bad rent-an-performer during his opening speech closed to the public. It was supposedly obvious that he was given a very good brief but he was unable to deliver it coherently, mixing up the parts, forgetting sentences and garbling the message intended to reassure allies completely.

NATO allies completely freaked out realizing that Trump didn’t even understand international politics on the level of an eight grader, not to mention that he couldn’t coherently reproduce an one paragraph brief.

Allegedly Mattis stepped in after that and on the series of operational meetings informed allies that they should pretty much ignore everything the POTUS says and calmed everyone down with concrete point-by-point plans that demonstrated increased commitment of all NATO member states.

Allegedly he’s a hugely impressive larger-than-life individual.

Here’s another tidbit I’ve heard - allegedly a large number of American civilian lives were saved thanks to timely and crucial intelligence provided by several small NATO countries usually ridiculed by Breitbart for “freeloading” and Mattis was at pains to emphasize this and the two-way dynamic of the US-NATO allies relationship.

This may all be embellished bullshit, but I have no reason to doubt the individual in question.

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Wasn’t there a story yesterday where Mattis flat out refused to kill Assad after Assad gassed people? Was that from the book?

If only Mattis was around when Nixon wanted to bomb Cambodia.