Yes but if shown proof would it change your mind about anything? Are you against federal law enforcement covering their faces, beating and detaining people illegally?
He is the most popular Republican president, among other Republicans, we have had in our lifetime. Anecdotal: I live in a red state with red friends and red family. They might not like this or that but they are unwavering in their support for Trump the man. It is still very uncomfortable to say even the most superficially negative thing about him or his policies. So, maybe there is some internal dialog going on there that I'm not privy to, but outwardly the support is 100% there, and that is all that really matters.
What you observe is cognitive dissonance resolved by ignorance. I dont have any advice for you, since i dont know your close ones, but a warning. When these conflicts dont get resolved in a constructive way, this behavioral conditioning might lead to repulsion targeting you. I have lost a long time childhood friend, even though my approach to him was always calm but persistent for over a decade.
Yes. The hardest thing about all of this is watching people I've known for years defend the indefensible. It is really difficult to stomach hearing your grandma call for the insurrection act.
What do you feel makes their support so unwavering? Are they fine with anything as long as they feel the "bad people" are hurt? Do they genuinely see themselves getting richer? Do they simply only watch Fox News and other conservative media and never consider what's happening in their neighborhood?
They built an entire identity around it. They're in too deep to just back off and admit to being wrong. It's the same reason why doomsday cults are stronger and more united the day after the predicted end of the world: It's too late to back off, the only solution is to dig deeper.
There are as many answers to that are there are Trump supporters I know. These aren't stupid or evil people, and I don't think its as nefarious the things you are suggesting, at least in most cases. On the other hand, as I sit here and try to answer your question, I can't come up with anything that paints anyone in a very good light and I just end up with more questions.
Ultimately I think there is a common personality trait that allows a person to rationalize pretty much anything. And I think most people have that personality trait. Maybe I do for all I know.
The exchange in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls always comes to mind:
“But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”
I agree with your sentimen. I'll use a favorite quote of mine as well
Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
Robert A. Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity
Whether they know the evil or not, they will go out of their way to to find a way to justify it. That's why those scare news on networks works so well. It gives them "permission" to accept something they wanted to believe,and now they have "proof".
Moreover, it's part of a core issue many in this society fall into (all across political spectrums) : it is shameful to be wrong. And apologizing makes you "weak". Even if you do change your mind, you can never admit it. And some people will be on their deathbed spouting a belief they changed on rather than "showing weakness".
I don't know how and if we can change that cultural element. That seems deeper than any billionaire regime.
We have to teach kids about cognitive biases, best by example or demonstration, and how you keep your sceptic guard up for life. We needed this even before the internet started to actively target these cognitive biases.
When you say "our lifetime" you must be talking about people who were born after 2004? Reagan was certainly more popular among Republicans, and I think W was at the end of his first term (he definitely was right after 9/11 when approval ratings for anything American were approximately 100% within America).
Your intuition about this is wrong. Reagan's approval among Republicans averaged about 83%, Trump's numbers are typically over 90%, although currently he's down to an all-time low of around 85%.
You are quite wrong about GW as well. While he had a mandate, at first, for Iraq, he was deeply polarizing in pretty much every other regard.
seeing Dem numbers be in the single didgits and republican numbers in the high 80's really exemplifies how utterly divided the "United" States has become. I don't think any other president in the last century has been so divisive.
There's basically no more room for Dem's to disapprove, so I guess it's up to "Independents" to wake up.
My intuition is not wrong, and I am absolutely not wrong about GW Bush's approval ratings right after 9/11 (a peak of 99% approval among Republicans) and his approval ratings afterwards through the rest of his first term: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ra...
Concerning Reagan, I was looking at his 93% approval rating when he left office, and comparing it to Trump's approval rating at the end of his first term, but I am aware there are metrics where Trump would be seen as more popular than Reagan among Republicans, such as minimum approval rating): https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/ronald-reaga...
Trump's militant support among Republicans is irritating to say the least, but there's no need to rewrite history or double down on incorrect statements on your part.
Your own sources show that Trump is more popular than Reagan among Republicans. Just because there was a moment in history where his numbers were better than Trump's doesn't undo the fact that over the long term, on average, Trump is more popular with Republicans than Reagan was. Demonstrably. Is there a conservative left in America willing to have an honest conversation?
I explained why I mentioned Reagan and acknowledged that Trump is more popular by some metrics, but he doesn't matter ultimately because GW Bush was more popular than Trump with Republicans more recently by absolute highest level of support, an average over basically any time period over his first term, or the lowest level of support, which is why I said you must only be talking about people born after 2004.
You're just as bad as the conservatives you dislike, because the issue is that you're all ideologues, not the specific ideology.
All I have anymore is an undoubtedly flawed moral compass, but I know these things are wrong and, up until the last few years, they were not at all partisan. And this is just to name a few:
* Law enforcement should not wear masks.
* The military should not be used to police US citizens.
* The US should not threaten to invade peaceful allies. Canada. Greenland.
Anyone who violated any of these, regardless of party, would immediately lose my support forever. These aren't "mistakes", they are evil deeds. So, tell me who is an ideologue.
As others have said already, they are just un-obscuring the server API and restoring local control to your speakers when they discontinue the service. There is nothing noble about this, it is almost least they could do. I walked away from a large investment in Sonos gear over forcing legacy equipment into the cloud, this sort of thing is why.
Look, I don’t think there’s a good reason to attempt to take it in the first place, especially when a friendly ally already controls it without any threats of any kind happening (compared to say, the Cuban Missile Crisis for the opposite situation).
However, the rest of NATO has nothing to gain from throwing their whole military at the US in the Western Hemisphere. They certainly can’t win that conflict, so what would be the point? Just to kill hundreds of thousands of their troops?
They should know that the Americans aren’t going to kill the residents anyway, so it’s really just an idiotic dick-waving contest that Trump wants. The smart move would be to diplomatically retaliate and just screw with the US economically, to extract a concession from the next US President, who won’t have such
obtuse ideas and will be eager to make the consequence of this self-inflicted jackassery (like no Americans allowed to visit the EU, EU regulators banning Google and Apple devices, etc) go away.
The point would be to stop an aggressor before it gets worse. I’m not saying they’d attack the mainland or anything like that, but they would side, militarily, against us.
When the time comes, they will get on board, just like they always do. The only appropriate and convincing response would have come ages ago and went something like “are you a fucking lunatic?”
Tillis doesn't put it quite so bluntly, but he comes close:
> “I’m sick of stupid,” a fiery Tillis declared in the Senate. ... he told his colleagues that Miller’s comments were “absurd.”
> “Mr. Miller said that the US government – obviously Greenland should be part of the US. That is absurd,” he said.
> Tillis also ... “What makes me cranky? Stupid. ...
I mean, he's a politician, so he tries to throw Miller under the bus (instead of admitting the stupid rots like a fish), and he claims he's the only one speaking his mind because of his committee (not because he's retiring and doesn't worry about being primaried), but I find absurd stupidity comes close to fucking lunacy.
Then again, I thought GWB and his posse were fucking lunatics, and now I've had to reevaluate their statesmanship.
One nice thing about US Americans: they're always so optimistic!
One day Rabinovich is browsing the local news site, as is his habit, and he clicks it away but somehow a chatbot still pops up on his screen:
— Moishe :tada:, we notice that you only come to our site once a day, and not only do you not doomscroll, you don't even scroll past the fold. :-( Is there anything we could do to improve your engagement?
— No, no, I only come to check the obituaries.
— But the obituaries are in their own section, linked from the footer. You never even see the footer!
— Believe you me, this obituary will be above the fold.
> what would be the point?
a Danish poem from 1940:
Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain,
of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.
Regarding hemisphere - Sorry, I just meant that countries that aren't the US have limited long-distance power projection abilities and limited sustained logistics capabilities. That's because the US has been policing every ocean for 50 years while the other navies have been mainly sailing around to keep an eye on their territorial waters.
Anyway, does Reykjavik have a big military logistics depot?
Have you heard the joke that ends "I don't have to outrun the bear"?
I went to elementary school in the US, and it was there that I learned how you have to handle bullies. You don't have to be able to beat them up, you only have to make them work[0] hard enough to beat you up[1] that they start picking on someone who is more fun and less work to abuse[2].
[0] when I told my wife how "calling someone out" worked in the States, she was horrified: she said, yes, of course the boys here fight, but they fight in anger, spontaneously — what kind of barbarians make notes in their agendas to kick each others' ass, in cold blood, later?
[1] the better kind of bully only goes to first blood. Worse are the O'Briens (read "Such, such were the joys" and you may understand were that character comes from) who continue beating you up just so others see they can:
> "Even if people stop rebelling against the party, the Party will manufacture new traitors so that it can be seen crushing them."
Either way, even though I lost every single fight, no one picked on me again after I'd called them out. (bullies are not into schlep?)
[2] yes, maybe in hindsight it would have been better to stand up for those they switched to. My wife was also horrified by "snitches get stitches". In practice, JFK tried to create a world in which the strong were just, the weak secure, and the peace protected, but obviously others in the US didn't care for those goals.
Indeed this concept of hemispheres to justify military action is total nonsense, the Prime Meridian could have been placed anywhere. Strictly speaking, the whole of Ireland may be invaded by the USA according to this "doctrine".
I didn't mean to imply that. I was only speaking of how pragmatic it would be for European powers to handle the logistics to fight a land war in Greenland. The US can project power basically anywhere, but it's harder for smaller navies to pull that off.
As far as the logistics go: in 1982 the UK managed to land several regiments on the Mal^W Falkland Islands (13'000 km); surely it'd be easier to do similar, over much shorter distances?
Note: if AR (a client state* of the US at the time) had been hoping the Monroe Doctrine would be put into practice for them, that hope was in vain.
(who'd want to invade IE anyway? They have no culture beyond a pair of shite gaelic rappers and they're so backward they still travel on horseback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8 )
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