Life and chess are incomparable. The fact that one can move on from a game like chess is another reason why it is a false analogy.

Minority or majority rule is not the rule of the people, but the rule of some people over other people. And so long as democracy remains collectivist and statist this is how it will always be. All that we have to protect the individual are the threadbare and paper-thin human rights some institutions have agreed upon, but which are violated across the board nonetheless.

If we want true democracy, the rule of the people, we cannot rule over the people. We have to quit thinking in statist terms. Democracy in the form of government is a perversion of democracy. It isn’t nor can ever be the rule of the people.

Stop thinking in statist terms is a good start.

The utility of the state is a part of the problem. People think they can just set the great machine in motion and reach their desired goals, so they compete to sit at its levers. Understandable. However, whatever direction it moves or whichever class it operates to benefit, people are being ground beneath its weight at all times. It operates parasitically, survives on plunder and extortion, so the immorality of it all would remain even if angels occupied its positions.

Worse, its coordination requires force and coercion. Involuntary coordination is on the spectrum of slavery. Assuming that it’s evil to force people to serve my ends, I’d much rather find voluntary means of coordination.

If you look at the earliest examples of statehood, these forms "occur naturally" as seen by their repeated emergence and are at the same time imposed, and are deeply exploitive.

Very true. States are essentially the organized means of exploitation imposed by the conquering class upon the vanquished, and it has been that way from their beginning. Even through centuries of reform their fundamental functions and institutions still remain.

The end result is that all subsequent political movements, whether Marxist, liberal, or fascist, have only ever convinced the revolutionary to adopt and use the system of their oppressors to serve their political ends.

Yes and I think it is abusive. Nonetheless, socialists say this is the right thing to do... because the rich and businessmen need to be solidary with the working class or the poorest (meanwhile those taxes always end up to cover the costs of minorities... But this is a subject of a different topic). My country is a example of what happens when political correctness is in power.

It’s odd reasoning, if there is any reasoning in it at all. Solidarity with the working class will never result from raising someone’s taxes. It’s pure socialist propaganda.

I noticed they are slashing the 10% sales tax for feminine hygiene products. You’re right. Political correctness is in power.

The idiom “one cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” serves well to explain that it isn’t so much a hijacking but the inevitable result of such a system. Such a system doesn’t occur naturally, but is imposed, often against the wishes of large subsets of the population. A state can now use Marx’s dream to justify any and all atrocities and privations.

The forceful transfer of wealth from private to state hands is one of the less talked about tyrannies in human history. A little math might explain the apparent arbitrariness of the amount of taxation, and a budget of some sort might explain what the state plans to do with its newly found wealth, but nothing can explain away the unjust transfer of wealth, the outright theft, that is taxation.

A company earning more than a million has to give a quarter of what it earns to your government. To cover that cost while at the same time covering the overhead the best one can do is lower wages, raise prices, cut corners, lay people off, and so on, just to be able to pay such exorbitant prices. Even if we let the state get away with the act of theft, it’s hard to look past the effects all this has on the poorer among us who have to deal with the rise in the cost of living, a large amount of which is used to cover any offsetting. A tax on the rich is also a hidden tax on the poor, in this sense.

The term was once a socialist bugaboo but has become familiar with overuse. In the mouths of critics and defenders alike “capitalism” confounds more than it clarifies, though, because if capital is the portion of wealth which is applied to the production of more wealth, then any system that does not consider the ownership and management of capital is unthinkable. All systems are capitalist. The differences lie only in who ought to own the capital, whether public or private, employer or employee, the collective or individual, and so on. Even Lois Blanc, who arguably coined the term, says as much (the appropriation of capital by the few, to the exclusion of the many).

The referendums in eastern Ukraine went swimmingly for Russia. Annexation is next.

I know it's nos but I don't even need to leave this page to find an ignorant opinion. I'm really surprised to hear you think that the average person is well-versed in what it means to be transgender, non-binary or such. For how long have these concepts really been in the public consciousness? LGBT is now LGBTQIA and the list of ideas and concepts surrounding gender continue to change every single year.

It doesn’t take much to assume dysphoria and contempt for one’s own body must be harrowing. Dysphoria is the antonym to euphoria, after-all. It’s ignorant to assume otherwise.

The contextomy was quite obvious. You even removed the last half of one sentence in order to give weight to the first half. Sorry, pal, but this is disinfo of the highest order.

It is meaningless. Remove the make-up, the clothes, the act, and we’ll see the reality of it all, and whether one’s identity conforms with it or not. This inescapable reality must bear heavily on the gender bender, I imagine.

Here’s the real quote before you had your way with it.

The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%.

Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.7% after inflation.

After-tax corporate profits went up, and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.

The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.

The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.

The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.

Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.

Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.

Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%. Carbon emissions from energy consumption dropped 11.5%.

Handgun production rose 12.5% last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.

The murder rate last year rose to the highest level since 1997.

Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appellate court seats and a quarter of District Court seats.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/

And everyone with anti-Trump, pro-Biden points get a huge pass.

“Listen to Ben Bail out Wallstreet Bernanke”….I’ll pass.

The proof is in the pudding.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0L1E?output_view=pct_12mths

Biden bears no responsibility for the American economy. His American Rescue Plan Act, his Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, have little to no effect on inflation and the economy…unless the economy is good, of course.

The question as to weather a president can declassify at will or has to follow a process are addressed in the quotes I cited, all of which contradicts your assertions saying otherwise. That you’d shift focus to their opinions on an impeachment strategy in order to avoid this accounting is obvious.

“Different people say different things but as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it. Because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. There doesn’t have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be.”

Trump’s statement is true, and that’s probably why the phrase “by thinking about it” was torn from its context and served as fodder for those who fall for those sorts of efforts.

Article 2 says NOTHING about classified information.

But the Supreme Court has long ago determined that his classification powers come from his authority under Article II of the Constitution.

According to Executive order 13,526, which established the detailed process through which secret information can be appropriately declassified, he is obligated to follow procedure. Executive orders have the force of law. Only a subsequent executive order can overturn an executive order. Trump did not do that and could not do that by thinking it.

As Lawfareblog determined:

Let’s dispense with one easy rabbit hole that a lot of people are likely to go down this evening: the President did not “leak” classified information in violation of law. He is allowed to do what he did. If anyone other than the President disclosed codeword intelligence to the Russians in such fashion, he’d likely be facing a long prison term. But Nixon’s infamous comment that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the President gets to disclose what he wants.

The reason is that the very purpose of the classification system is to protect information the President, usually through his subordinates, thinks sensitive. So the President determines the system of designating classified information through Executive Order, and he is entitled to depart from it at will. Currently, Executive Order 13526 governs national security information.

The Supreme Court has stated in Department of the Navy v. Egan that “[the President’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.” Because of his broad constitutional authority in this realm, the president can, at any time, either declassify information or decide whom to share it with.

Michael’s reasoning attempts to make us believe that a President must follow “established procedures” as outlined by another president’s executive order, and that the lower courts get to decide what the leader of the entire American military can and cannot declassify.

I’m aware that the case has to do with the inadvertent declassification of documents, and said as much.

“Your ruling shows that the president cannot inadvertently declassify documents.”

“Designated officials” are those designated by the commander in chief, the president. The power to declassify at will is satisfied by article 2 of the US constitution. He is not obligated to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed.

The ruling says “we decline to hold that the judiciary may conclude that certain executive branch statements may trigger inadvertent declassification because such determinations encroach upon the President’s undisputedly broad authority in the realm of national security”. The judiciary has no say on this matter. The “procedure” is that the president is the highest authority on classification, has “undisputedly broad authority”, and can declassify anything at will. Trump is right. “You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it”.

The president can do whatever he wants with classified documents. He is ultimate authority.

Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures.

...

Because declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures, that argument fails.

“Established procedure” is that the president is the ultimate authority on classified materials and can declassify at will. Your ruling shows that the president cannot inadvertently declassify documents.

Heritage Expert: Americans Have Lost $4,200 in Annual Income Under The Biden Administration

Under former President Trump’s low-inflation economy, the average American worker’s real annual earnings increased by $4,000. That has been completely wiped out in about a year and a half under the Biden administration. Despite seeing the failure of various policies, such as paying people more to stay home than remain employed, the Biden administration has doubled down on these mistakes so that families can no longer afford to live in Biden’s America.

At least there are no more mean tweets.

The danger or threat is found wherever it becomes authoritarian, for instance the idea that one must, as a duty, dismiss his own grammar and furnish it with another’s. If it’s about choice, all parties involved ought to be able to use whatever pronouns they wish. Isn’t that so?

Other than that I think the only concern for me is the normalizing of drastic and irreversible medical interventions in young people, such as using puberty blockers, which often amounts to chemical castration.

At any rate, I do not see transgenderism as some threat to the concept of gender. Gender is largely incoherent, anyways, and can be dropped altogether.

Those with gender dysphoria deserve as much respect and dignity as anyone else. My empathy ends the moment I am told to conform my language to another’s demands, that I must concede grammar and truth to people who are knowingly misidentifying themselves. So there is an ethical component to it as well.

Past and future are posited beyond all things, so no, they don't exist.

Trump didn’t torpedo the deal. He withdrew from it citing Iran’s failed compliance. Now Iran continues to violate it right in Europe’s face and Biden is considering going back to it. Laughable.

I guess we could have given them another 20 years and another couple trillion dollars to get our “allies” ready to stand on their own feet, but really, no amount of counterfactuals can justify more intervention there.

He was legally allowed to do it, therefore there is no national security issue

That’s not what I said, though. I said I’m not concerned; and I’m not concerned until I have reason to be concerned; and because he had those powers there is no reason to believe something untoward or nefarious has happened.

At any rate, “national security” is an excuse to abuse power. So many lives and livelihoods have been sacrificed on that alter. You can almost see the foam at the mouth of chickenhawks whenever they invoke it, and you can predict with decent accuracy that someone is about to lose their rights. I don’t like thinking in imposter terms such as that.

It is not simply that the material belongs to the national archives, it is that the material contains classified documents. Having them in his personal possession raises national security issues. The fact that he did not protect them from a whole host of people raises national security issues. Is it that you are not able to see why it is of concern, or are you just pretending not to?

I am not concerned. He was the president of the United States, the commander in chief, and had the unilateral power to do whatever he wanted with those documents, including taking them home. What concerns me is a political DOJ and FBI raiding a former president’s house and stealing these documents, among other personal items.

If someone were to read this without having read what comes before it they might assume you are talking about Trump.

And they’d be wrong.

Spoken like a true Trumpster. The allied interests of the world are our interests. It is not as if we are separate and safe from a nuclear threat that only affects the rest of the world.

They’re your interests, maybe. Trump has done more for peace in the Middle East in one term than decades of your allied interests.

They should be evaluated on the basis of accuracy or other measures. The potential of how others might use them is irrelevant to the philosophies themselves. Not only that, but it is a dangerous grammatical mistake to treat words as subjects and human beings as their objects. Philosophies in particular and words in general do not act upon human beings in the way we pretend they do.

Based on what you have said you have made it clear once again that you did not read the article. What do you hope to gain by providing further evidence of it?

I don’t care about the article or the book of some establishment bureaucrat. I read what you quoted and what you tried to sell from it. The suggestion of yours and the reviewer that Trump’s concerns were partisan is still nonsense. The idea that using the FBI to raid political opponents over national archives disputes is in any way comparable to “pressuring” federal prosecutors to do their job is also nonsense.

So, because Iranian soldiers were busy killing US soldiers while US soldiers were busy killing Iranian soldiers (it's called "war") efforts to salvage a nuclear arms deal made by several world powers should not have taken place? The allied interests of the world, not the unilateral interests of Trump or what he thinks are the interests of the US are at issue.

The efforts of former bureaucrats to undermine the president of the United States and coddle one of America’s adversaries while it was killing American soldiers should not have taken place. I don’t give a straw for the “allied interests of the world”.

You can’t name a single return on investment. Iran gets everything, United States gets nothing. A shoddy deal.

The reviewer quotes Berman. Perhaps I assumed too much, that you would know what an advanced copy is and how quoting sources work.

Yes, I know how quoting works, and I know that he was not in fact quoting Berman in the content you provided. If he did quote Berman, you’d be able to provide the quote. But you can’t. So all this condescending talk about reviews and quoting is hilarious.

The problem is with your characterization of the meetings as rogue.

According to a report in The Washington Times, Zarik also met with Robert Malley, who was President Obama’s Middle East adviser and Obama-era Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. All were top U.S. negotiators of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The fact of the matter is that there were efforts throughout the Trump years to minimize the harm being caused by him. Kerry's allegiance was not to Trump, but to the US. And this failure to demonstrate allegiance to him is why Trump pushed for an investigation.

In 2019, Trump himself, according to the article, sought to open his own back channel of communication with top Iranian officials.

That’s right. Smug bureaucrats from the previous administration were undermining the duly-elected president of the United States policy in Iran, and this during a time when Iran was busy killing US soldiers in Iraq. So the idea Trump was mad for partisan reasons is breathtakingly stupid.

What did the US get out of the deal? Maybe you can name one thing.

That is what I did! If you had read the piece you would know that. But you do not even read some of the things you link to, so there is no reasonable expectation that you would read this one.

No, you quoted the reviewer. But you claimed it was Berman’s claim. So why won’t you show me Berman’s claim?

What did he say and where did he say it? Or don't you actually know because he didn't actually read more than a headline?

When asked about reports of him meeting the Iranian foreign minister he said “ Yes, I have. That’s accurate”. It was on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.

And what did the US get out of the deal?

Who is "she"? The reviewer, Benjamin Weiser, is not making any claims. He is reviewing a book by Geoffrey S. Berman. It is Berman who made the claim. How does this lead to your conclusion that the review is breathtakingly stupid?

Then quote him.

You turn a rumor into a fact. Trump himself tweeted that what Kerry was doing was:

Kerry himself admitted it. The Iranian foreign minister confirmed it. You’re turning a fact into a rumor.

I have read it.

Why was it a good deal?