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  #11  
Unread 03-24-2018, 06:50 PM
Matt Q Matt Q is offline
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Hmm, nobody seems to be considering moving to the UK, I see.
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  #12  
Unread 03-24-2018, 07:33 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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It's things like this that give me reason to believe things will change for the better. Things will turn around. Not magically, but somehow.

Read it from top to bottom, then from bottom to top.
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  #13  
Unread 03-24-2018, 07:34 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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We might as well stay put because
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  #14  
Unread 03-25-2018, 02:41 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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My fear is not really that Trump will start Armageddon. It is that daily he subverts 250 years of American democratic ideals. I can't calculate the damage to the country and the planet.

Cheers,
John

Last edited by John Isbell; 03-25-2018 at 04:00 AM.
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  #15  
Unread 03-25-2018, 06:17 AM
Catherine Chandler's Avatar
Catherine Chandler Catherine Chandler is offline
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Julie, I "fought" in my own way (stuff that made a "real-world difference") to bring an end to the war in Vietnam, a war in which a beloved family member died for nothing. I soon after adopted (and was adopted by) Canada, where my children and I have lived in peace for well over twice the time I lived where I happened to be born. However much I love Canada, its proximity to the madness south of its border is becoming a matter of concern. If need be, I will take my children and grandchildren to another hemisphere for refuge. Hopefully, as Jim says, things will turn around. For now, it seems unlikely.
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  #16  
Unread 03-25-2018, 11:11 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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Matt, you're English humor is not lost on me. Buy me a ticket to the Highlands of England and I will see what I will see...
(I spent the better part of two years living in Richmond Surrey. That was nice. But I was a smoker then and the air in the winter nearly killed me. Both our countries, I'm afraid, are suffering from the spoils of our freedoms. Don't make me quote Yeats' Second Coming) If Trump is the beast at least we can vote him out. Right? Right? Right?

Roger, the music piece you linked is darkly funny and frighteningly, surreally fitting. A kind of "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life". The band is still playing as the Titantic tilts and slips down. Stay with the band. The music is good for you.

To Julie's point of pulling up stakes vs. staying and fighting for change: I'm reminded of the droves of humans who every day leave their own homelands because they've made a decision to make a better life for themselves vs. staying and being a part of the effort to change things in their own country. That's probably not a great analogy because most of the time those people are leaving on foot, on flimsy rafts adrift in vast seas, in suffocating squalor aboard a cattle car they paid for with every penny they had without knowing what their fate will be... so it might not be the best analogy but still, there is something to it, I think. Exodus from any place is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

I think we should just arrange for Biden and Trump to have that fistfight they threatened behind the gymnasium of the Pentagon.
So here we are… A country whose "leaders behave like children and whose children behave like leaders."
That’s the good news.
x

Last edited by Jim Moonan; 03-25-2018 at 03:53 PM.
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  #17  
Unread 03-25-2018, 04:47 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Sorry, I should probably know better than to fight hyperbole with hyperbole.

I'm really not as nationalistic as I must have sounded. Ugh. And I particularly don't want to be perceived as blaming refugees for not staying in their homelands to be starved and/or murdered.

What I meant was, people with a daft and nefarious agenda want everyone to think that resistance to that agenda is futile, and that the situation is hopeless.

Oppose their agenda anyway, in whatever way you can.

Personally, I think that Tom Lehrer was an optimist, and that the worst case scenario is more likely to resemble Nevil Shute's On the Beach (i.e., long, drawn-out suffering as radioactivity slowly engulfs and poisons the entire globe from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern). There's no escaping this, if it's allowed to start.

There! How's that for a pep talk?

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-25-2018 at 07:23 PM. Reason: and the sitch is hopeless --> and that the sitch is hopeless
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  #18  
Unread 03-25-2018, 08:37 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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They made a good movie of On the Beach with Anthony Perkins, as I recall. A sad film.

Cheers,
John

Update: yup, Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. Also Fred Astaire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)

Last edited by John Isbell; 03-25-2018 at 11:36 PM.
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  #19  
Unread 03-26-2018, 01:31 AM
Siham Karami Siham Karami is offline
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Sometimes it helps to read an article like this. True and full of nice barbs. I especially like the “war crimes” bit. Now maybe that could have teeth???

For my 2 cents, the selection of Bolton and firing of McMaster put us into a new level of danger. Who now would wrestle Trump over the nuclear football? No more voices of reason in the loony bin? We must do something bigger. But what?
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  #20  
Unread 03-26-2018, 02:25 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Thanks for the link, Siham. Will is an elegant user of the language. The same journal has a Hugh Hewitt op-ed: "Why John Bolton is a great choice for the Trump White House." Hewitt who, folks may remember, was at one point a never Trumper. Evidently his principles encountered force majeure.

Cheers,
John
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