JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Politics HERE only!

Get it. Respect it.

And I did call you out ...in the spirit of intelligent discussion and debate...curiosity...but I get you wanting this to get back to music and lyrics

Back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Voter ID
Government Waste, Fraud, Abuse
Globalism
False Racism
Juvenile Gender Dysphoria
Useless Teacher Unions
Diminishing Birthrate
Transgender Sports
Increasing Suicide
AI Political Bias
Social Engineering / Class Separation
Pharmaceutical Dependence
MSM Brainwashing
Misleading Advertising

Can't you numbskulls think of "ANYTHING" more important to talk about... than Trump...

=AND=

Write songs?

Thanks John. Appreciate you.
I didn't truly feel like you were badgering me.
I'm just trying to pull back from the arguments here.

With regard to Trump, he has so many fires burning, that it's taxing to try to follow them all, and the propaganda from every direction is off-the-charts.
I still look at the news every morning, but I'm limiting it to that.

Have a good day and thanks for your response,

Marty

Lol... Didn't think so!

::: https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=15005840 :::

I haven't changed!

https://www.jpfolks.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1190832/my-country.html

Now, if after receiving due process, Kilmar Garcia is found guilty and deported..all my objections...all based on lack of due process and "we are in a hurry" mistakes, are gone and I have no issue.

The others who were deported...from what I understand...did have serious run ins with the law...so less sympathy for their plight.

I expect this to be a fair trial despite some early frothing simply because all eyes are on this.

I think America should just take South America AND Canada...
Show Putin how it's done!

I recently visited a Nazi concentration camp museum in Germany, in Dachau to be exact. There, you could see and read how Hitler and the Nazis gained power some 100 years ago. The government dictating what schools and colleges were allowed to teach. How people were deported into prisons in other countries. Back then they were called concentration camps. How the German NS, the leading party back then, seized power and implemented its ideology of racial supremacy, national expansion, and authoritarian control. This included policies like the suppression of minorities, the persecution of political opponents, and the expansion of territory. I don't know but for some reason I had to think of Canada and Greenland and just recently how the richest man on the planet was warned by our government not to support the opposition. I always thought we were free to support any party we wanted to. I could see many parallels to today's government, as if history were repeating itself. But, who knows ... maybe I'm wrong.

YES! Exactly!
We need another Hitler to clean house and end the petty infighting.
All dissenters must be executed.

Sieg Heil!

This is the shite that turns me off about Trump.

I like some if the things he does or tried to do, whereas most politicians promise things, but then use the fact they weren't allowed to do what they promised due to constitutional laws and house vs senate.. etc as excuse, he tries to get around that and be a doer.

But this is unacceptable. You cant threaten everybody who disagrees with you.

This is America dude
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-musk-face-very-170018750.html

Vice President J.D. Vance’s first major assignment from Donald Trump was to join a bunch of European leaders who thought of themselves as our close allies—and to read them the riot act. This happened at the Munich Security Conference on February 14. Instead of discussing armaments and armies, Vance said: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” Europe, according to Vance, had become hostile to free speech. It was hostile to free speech because it was hostile to democracy. And you could measure its hostility to democracy by the fact that for 50 years European voters had kept asking for less immigration and had kept getting more of it. Vance admitted that it reminded him a bit of the United States.

Is Vance right about Europe and the West more generally?

Vance is certainly right that the Europeans’ situation resembles ours. Europe is split between two camps: so-called “populists” and “elites.” (Neither of the two camps has a name for itself, so—without any ill will—we’ll use the names applied to each by their foes.) The difference between here and there is that for the second time in three elections, populists have now taken power in the U.S. In Europe they have a harder time, ruling only in Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary.

As Vance sees it, that’s because Europeans have worked to make populist victories impossible. He has been particularly critical of Germany. In February, the main anti-immigration party there, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), became the country’s second-largest, close behind the Christian Democrats. The Social Democrats, who are one of the most successful political parties of modern times, have been contending for power in Germany since the middle of the 19th century. The AfD has now left them in the dust. And yet the AfD was kept out of the Munich Security Conference, so Vance went out and met with their leader, Alice Weidel. In so doing, he waded into a live controversy.

German progressives argue that ostracizing the AfD is necessary—even if it means excluding the AfD from legislative functions to which they are constitutionally entitled as the largest opposition party. Otherwise Germany risks repeating the horrors of Nazism. The AfD’s supporters counter that their party was founded in 2013 by a bunch of macro-economists concerned about German bailouts of deeply indebted European countries. It can have little to do with the Nazis. Of the war criminals long tracked by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, only three appear to be still alive, all of them about 100 years of age. Not much to build a revanchist movement around. And yet efforts to police Nazism have suddenly taken on a new life, ten decades after Nazism’s founding and eight decades after its defeat.

While Vance has not said much on the subject, his opinion can be guessed: for him, the criticism leveled at the AfD in the name of anti-Nazism is a lot like the criticism leveled at populist Republicans in the U.S. in the name of DEI, ESG, wokeness, or civil rights. It is political sabotage masquerading as historical responsibility. Vance was criticized for meeting with Weidel, not without reason. A politician on a state visit is hosted by the government, not the opposition—his meeting with Weidel was a breach of protocol. On the other hand, evidence for his way of viewing things continues to mount. In April, a poll by the Forsa Institute showed the AfD to be not the second but the top party in Germany, with 26 percent approval. Then the federal office of constitutional protection declared that AfD would be placed under heightened surveillance as a “threat to human dignity.”

It is a troubling sign when a party’s rise in the polls doesn’t mean it’s about to take office but that it’s about to get banned. Attempts to disqualify candidates have gone global, and the candidates who get this treatment tend to have a common, anti-establishment profile. There’s Trump, with his 34 felonies. There’s Marine Le Pen, the top-polling candidate for the next presidential elections in France, who was recently banned from those elections—for an irregularity in the procedures for paying office assistants that her party established seven years before she became its leader.

Just as troubling is what happened last November in Romania. The same political establishment has ruled Romania since the Cold War. A populist candidate named Calin Georgescu rose quickly in the polls by attacking this establishment—and also by opposing the Ukraine war. Not only did the first round show Georgescu the big winner, but it also eliminated the Social Democratic prime minister who had been thought to have a lock on the presidency. With voting already underway in the second round, authorities canceled the election and claimed that Georgescu had been backed by Russian disinformation spread on TikTok. Not a scrap of proof was offered. In fact, the president said that it was “impossible” to find hard evidence in cases like these, so voters would just have to believe the intelligence services.

The election was postponed until May. By March, it was obvious that Georgescu was going to win the rescheduled election, too. This doesn’t prove anything about any criminal charges, but it does prove that “Russian disinformation” was not responsible for Georgescu’s win the first time. At that point, authorities arrested him and banned him from the May vote. Was it based on new evidence that might prove the allegations from the first canceled election? Apparently not. Those allegations were not even mentioned.

***

A basic question emerges, though: Why does Vance care? Maybe he and Trump are in sympathy with Weidel, Le Pen, and Georgescu. But Trump and Vance are nationalists—or sovereigntists, to use the newfangled word for it. They think every country has the right to choose its political system and its leader. Even if these countries are being run corruptly, so what?

The reason Vance is bothered is that, since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global economy, foreign policy has become less national, more transnational, and more partisan. When Europeans influence a national election, they are also influencing international bodies to which the U.S. is bound by treaty. The most obvious example is NATO, but there are also various bloc-to-bloc trading arrangements and informal groups that work together at summits.

The importance of Germany and France is obvious. But Romania is vital, too. Alongside Poland, it is the pivotal European country in NATO’s attempt to support and arm Ukraine in its war with Russia. The American public has soured on this war and elected a president who was skeptical about it from the beginning. Electing such a president is exactly what the Romanians tried to do—and arguably did—in November. Had their decision been honored, then the American understanding of the Ukraine war would have had much more credibility in NATO discussions and in EU conclaves.

So what does it mean that Romania’s elites—possibly working with those in Europe and America—were unwilling to let that happen? They say they are intervening so as not to help Vladimir Putin. But Vance suspects they are intervening so as not to help Trump.

By “Europe,” of course, we mean not the whole continent but the European Union, based in Brussels. Since 1992 it has taken control of steering the politics of 27 nations. The EU is not a democracy. It usurps the sovereignty of various great nations. Before Americans heap abuse on it, they should remember that it is a project that America launched and abetted throughout the Cold War. It was the pro-American part of the European public that backed the dream of building an organization like the EU. They did so in the name of certain values they called Western—not Christianity (in which any European country could claim as great a share as America) but human rights (in which America had a better record, at least as people saw things late in the last century).

European right-wing parties always distrusted the EU. They saw it as a form of Americanization. They were right to do so. The EU helped spread global capitalism after the mid-1980s, annulling all those quirky regulations that had made globalization impossible (and made Europe distinctively European). The EU also, for better or worse, made possible the spread of NATO after the 1990s. President Trump’s claim that Europe doesn’t pay for its own defense is true if you look just at military budgets. But in a broader sense it is questionable. The U.S. may have bought the heavy weaponry, but the EU has spent lavishly to develop its eastern flank economically. It has decked out these post-communist countries with everything from opera houses to traffic circles to feminist NGOs. All these things may be superficial, but they made it seem less absurd that countries like Romania should belong in a U.S.-led Western alliance in the first place.

The EU brings benefits, but it does so by destroying national sovereignty. It seems to turn the countries it dominates into whimpering, simpering, dysfunctional shadows of the proud nations they once were. As Vance notes, 40 years ago all these European states had really good militaries. Belgium and Austria, for example, would have robust tank brigades and well-drilled air forces. EU membership has made such duplication look wasteful, so the national militaries have been allowed to decay and the large amounts of money saved have been poured into social benefits. Meanwhile, the EU has neither the political legitimacy nor the budget to start a military itself. Today these countries spend just enough on F-16s and F-35s to convince Americans to take the whole job of defending Europe on themselves. As power shifted to Brussels, all of these European countries became less impressive in Yankee eyes—and in their own. That gives a partial explanation of why the UK left the EU with Brexit.

***

The Trump-Vance view of Europe comes with certain ironies. Both really believe in national pride and national sovereignty. And yet the loss of those virtues in the nations of the EU has been one of the preconditions of America’s claim to “world leadership.” Trump and Vance are now proposing to strengthen European nations by giving them their sovereignty back, even at the price of strengthening them against us, their imperial masters. The feeling of the new administration seems to be that there is not really an alternative. The European countries have grown too weak to help us defend the West.

The EU is a system run by and for technocratic elites. During the financial crisis, which in Europe lasted for a half-decade after 2008, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicholas Sarkozy were able to use the EU’s institutions to replace the government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy with a technocratic one. They also blocked a referendum that would have allowed Greece to exit from the Euro. The EU is offstage most of the time, but it has mighty strings to pull when it needs to. It shifts power from legislatures to courtrooms and regulatory bodies. It offers a way for alumni of the better universities to veto democratic decisions and private contracts. EU politicians like to call Brussels a “regulatory superpower.” That’s a boast.

This means that the underlying problem that is being hashed out between Trump and Brussels has a partisan aspect. Since 1992, the year the Maastricht Treaty was signed and Bill Clinton elected, the EU has been in harmony with the Democratic Party in the U.S. When Democrats are in power, American relations with the EU tend to run smoothly. More than smoothly. Whenever Brexit-style anti-EU parties have governed in any of the EU’s member states—especially in Poland and Hungary in recent years—U.S. Democrats and their allies in the foundation sector have joined the EU in sanctioning, harassing, and investigating these populist parties until they become more EU-friendly. In 21st-century Europe, the U.S. has pursued not a national but a partisan foreign policy.

Consider Poland and Hungary. After the migration crisis of 2016, Law and Justice (PiS)—a Catholic, populist, anti-immigration party in Poland—won a powerful mandate at the ballot box. They pursued tight immigration policies and justice reform. They succeeded until Covid. But at the height of the pandemic, the EU passed a trillion-dollar stimulus and rescue plan. Although this was meant to be an emergency fund, with no political strings attached, the EU decided to withhold Poland’s $60 billion share, as long as the populists persisted with their immigration and justice policies. PiS was defeated in the 2023 elections by a pro-EU party that was almost immediately able to get those funds released.

Proportionately, it was as if someone had been able to withhold $2 trillion from the American economy until Americans agreed to vote a certain way. The Polish elections of 2023 were thus free—but they were not fair. Trump and Vance have taken notice. When they see the EU not only not sanctioning but congratulating Romania for emergency actions that are orders of magnitude more undemocratic than anything the Polish and Hungarian populists ever did, Vance and Trump smell a rat. Again, they believe the EU’s actions are not about “values” or “good government” or Putin, but about thwarting the U.S.—at least in the Trump era. The EU is turning into a conspiracy to deprive the U.S. of European allies and to sabotage the American position on the world stage.

Trump’s understanding of the global economy is of a piece with his understanding of the national economy. He sees both not as societies but as networks—networks where the borders between public and private, between domestic and foreign, are not always clear. This view drives Trump’s thinking on everything from tariffs to government efficiency. Recently, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he would cut 132 offices, he explained on Substack that he was focusing his cuts on agencies that served as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil.” MSNBC, in turn, accused Rubio of “taking a chainsaw to America’s soft power.”

Rubio’s description of his adversaries as “woke” is a useful reminder. In the half-year since Trump’s election, the U.S. appears to have overthrown wokeness. But other countries—with the possible exception of Britain—have not been convinced to do the same. In Ireland, France, and Germany, wokeness is still in the saddle. This tends to vindicate the Trump view that wokeness is not a culture but a power network. Wokeness doesn’t rest on convictions. It rests on the power of governments and employers to punish and threaten.

A battle is underway. In March, a poll of EU citizens found that 51 percent consider Trump an “enemy of Europe,” versus just nine percent who consider him a friend. Europeans now say of the U.S. what so many Americans said of Islamists during the George W. Bush administration: “They hate our values.” It’s as wrong now as it was then. The problem is not values but interests. American and European progressive elites have made themselves partisan actors in the other’s politics, assuming Republicans and other populists would be too dim to notice. For decades that assumption proved correct. Now that things are changing, friction is the natural result.

Tony, who in the world is going to read everything you posted? I did, even though I know you didn’t write that. Let me respond this way: Since when does America get involved in the elections of foreign countries? Why all of a sudden in Germany? Germany has over 40 different parties and of all the parties, Vance choses to support the AfD, the party closest to the Nazi ideology. If you read again what I posted after visiting an old Nazi concentration camp, then it is obvious what is happening. History is repeating itself. This time, not in Germany, but in the US.

I"ll take a shot at a few of JAPOV's topics.

False Racism > I will ask the next policeman who pulls me over whether he thinks racism exists, but since i am white, i havement been pulled over in over 50 years. so i might be a while before i get back to you on that.

Juvenile Gender Dysphoria - i don't know what dysphoria means, so maybe i will call myself numbskull and call JAPOV an Elitist. What i do know is that the last two times i have had to call the police, it is because of some A-holes racing cars and doing doughnuts at a nearby intersection. So if gender dysphoira means boys who feel the need to be extra supper male macho, than i'd say yeh, that is a problem.

Useless Teacher Unions - i was once a cab driver, and the teamsters collected their dues and never did jack [naughty word removed] for us. So i'm not a big fan of uniions, but the only thing stupider than unions is the notion that most employers will treat employee's nicely out of the kindness of their heart.

Diminishing Birthrate - 8 billion people isn't enough for you? or are you only worried that white people aren't having enough babies. in which case i might have to revise my answer of not knowing if racism still exists.

Transgender Sports - i'm not sure how to handle it, and maybe it is a problem, it just doesn't make my list of the top 25 billion things i need to worry about.

I

His answers never have to do with the question.

Gender dysphoria I believe refers to people who don't feel like their birth gender. Feel out of place in their bodies.

Unions are great, if it's a good union. Not all unions are equal. But between annuities, pensions the way they set up their members for retirement is a thing of beauty.

But some unions are useless.

The transgender sports thing is blown way out of proportion. It's not gripping the nation. But it keeps being brought up.

To me, it's obvious a biological man should not be competing against women. It's a clear advantage and not fair.

But watching the la riots I don't think this is that important right now either

This economy is tanking because of Trump , Will be in a ression soon

I’m sure you guys have already heard of this. Trump Mobile, a transformational, new cellular service designed to deliver top-tier connectivity, unbeatable value and all-American service and all of that for just 47.45$/month! To go with that the Trump organization also offers the T1 Phone, MADE IN THE USA! It costs just 499$!!!
https://www.trumpmobile.com

I know you’re going to say I’m suffering from TDS again, but CNBC just took a closer look at the offer. Now Trump is screwing his own MAGA supporters. The service they offer for 47$ is a sub-license from T-Mobile. You can get the same service from them for 15$. The T1 Phone is a cheap Chinese copy of one of Samsung’s phones. When asked, Trump Jr. said eventually the device will be manufactured in the US. Eventually??? When is that? It’s currently being imported from China. Who knows if they implemented tariff exemptions for this product. Wow, if you buy this, they say you’ll make America great again! Well … you’ll make the trade deficit worse and pay 3x the price for the mobile service but you will make the Trump organization richer. I’m pretty sure they’re going to sell thousands of them.

Trump is just raising hell and disrupting every thing . I don't see the value of him on being president

......