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@ILikePie5
Upon reflection, I can see how Katniss must have been afflicted with something similar to TDS in book 3.
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@ILikePie5
Fantasy books still teach you many things about human nature, the nature of the world, and logical causality. At least the good ones did.
That's why Hunger Games book 3 was such a let down since 1 and 2 were pretty good.
Book 3 didn't make any sense and didn't follow universal laws of human nature. It's almost like it was written solely to push a political narrative rather than to connect with the reader on universal concepts, much like some of the recent PC fantasy movies out of Hollywood like Capt Marvel and all of the Disney Star Wars.
Book 3 was an absolute chore to finish once the main protagonist character, Katniss became insane early in the book and lost all agency for her actions. Impossible to feel any connection to a zombie. I actually started rooting for the other side because at least they gave a reason for choosing their fate.
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@ILikePie5
It's so stupid. I remember watching a clip where Mark Dice randomly asked people in California the last book they read. Nearly all of them picked a book from high school if they could even remember reading a book.
People who don't read books have no clue what the hell is going on.
The "TLDR" crowd shouldn't be involved in major decisions.
I remember when the Mueller report was released, And I read the entire thing in a week.
Afterward, I read Starr's Report for comparison contrast.
Everyone I tried to talk about it with seemed to be from another planet.
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@ILikePie5
I guess that's what happens after 3 years being told what to think and what you shouldn't be thinking by a person on TV making $20,000 a day.
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@ILikePie5
It's almost like these folks can't possibly grasp the concept that you can be Orangemanbad while still being pissed off at China.
Why is it necessary and proper to praise China to be orangemanbad?
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@ATroubledMan
You don't really need to explain why you Support China and support the WHO.
That you admit it is enough.
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@ATroubledMan
That's just a blatant fabrication.
The World Health Organization (WHO) last week finally declared the coronavirus from China that rapidly spread across the world a pandemic. Now, with more than 150,000 confirmed cases globally and more than 5,700 deaths, the question is why it took so long for the WHO to perceive what many health officials and governments had identified far earlier.
We believe the organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, like China’s Xi Jinping, should be held accountable for recklessly managing this deadly pandemic. Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and, after meeting with Xi in January, has helped China to play down the severity, prevalence, and scope of the COVID-19 outbreak.
From the outset, Tedros has defended China despite its gross mismanagement of the highly contagious disease. As the number of cases and the death toll soared, the WHO took months to declare the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic, even though it had met the criteria of transmission between people, high fatality rates and worldwide spread.
When President Trump took a critical step to stop the coronavirus at U.S. borders by issuing a travel ban as early as Jan. 31, Tedros said widespread travel bans and restrictions were not needed to stop the outbreak and could “have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.” He warned that interfering with transportation and trade could harm efforts to address the crisis, and advised other countries not to follow the U.S. lead.
When he should have been focusing on global counter-pandemic efforts, Tedros instead was politicizing the crisis and helping Xi to shirk his responsibility for a series of wrongdoings in addressing the outbreak. Tedros used the WHO platform to defend the Chinese government’s gross violation of human rights. For example, from its first case discovered in November to its Wuhan lockdown, and even until today, China has been dishonest about the coronavirus’s origin and prevalence. People who tried to uncover it were detained or disappeared, their online reports and posts deleted. China has misinformed and misled the world, and Tedros joined this effort by publicly praising China’s “transparency” in battling the spread of the disease.
When Xi ordered Chinese health officials to speed up the development of drugs by using “integrated Chinese traditional herbal medicine and Western medicine,” the WHO’s official publication, “Q&A on coronaviruses (COVID-19),” made a subtle change. Chinese netizens found a discrepancy between the Chinese and English versions of a list of measures deemed ineffective against COVID-19. The English version listed four items — smoking, wearing multiple masks, taking antibiotics, and traditional herbal remedies. The fourth item was not included in the Chinese version. (Today the English version also has deleted that item.)
China recently pledged $20 million to help the WHO fight the COVID-19 outbreak, for which Tedros thanked Xi. But we note China’s connections to Tedros’s homeland of Ethiopia, now called East Africa’s “Little China” because it has become China’s bridgehead to influence Africa and a key to China’s Belt and Road initiative there. Indeed, China has invested heavily in Ethiopia.
Tedros was elected to his position with the WHO in 2017, despite the fact that he was not trained as a medical doctor and had no global health management experience. A former minister of health and minister of foreign affairs for Ethiopia, Tedros is an executive member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) political party, which came to power through a struggle in 1991 and has been listed as a perpetrator in the Global Terrorism Database. After he became the WHO’s chief, critics questioned Tedros’s attempt to appoint then-Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador.
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Tedros is not fit to lead the WHO. Because of his leadership, the world may have missed a critical window to halt the pandemic or mitigate its virulence. The world is now battling rising infections and many countries have imposed restrictions. As the leader of the WHO, Tedros should be held accountable for his role in mismanaging efforts to control the spread of the virus.
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@ILikePie5
Did you watch the recent gaslighting CNN did in real-time with their Chirons?
It's amazing!
"Angry Trump Uses Propaganda Video, Produced By Government Employees At Taxpayer Expense"
"Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into A Propaganda Session"
"Trump Uses Task Force Briefing to Rewrite History On Coronavirus Response"
What is funny is that CNN fake news didn't even air the "propaganda" videos, to "protect" their viewers from thoughtcrimes.
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@HistoryBuff
Of course, anyone who works for trump kisses his ass. It is a requirement of the job, because if they won't they don't work there for long. You can't work for a malignant narcissistic and not kiss their ass.
CNN will ALWAYS have a job for them.
Their "journalists" get paid $20,000 dollars a day to tell you what to think.
It's a great job.
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@ATroubledMan
The WHO and China thank you for your support.
Your check will be in the mail soon.
Trump closed the borders Jan 31 the day after WHO declared the pandemic in CHINA. America didn't have the same level of danger as China did on Jan 31, no death, no infections. The WHO was misleading people by suggesting the world was equally at risk when at the time China was the only unique nation with all the deaths in January. Cause it's the Chinese virus, not the American virus. WHO has done nothing but praise China.
Americans that praise China as the WHO did for shipping this pandemic over here from their barbaric wet-markets should be forcibly exported to the nearest communist nation.
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@ILikePie5
Same thing with Ukrainegate. They will simply claim Trump is forcing these people, Birx, Fauci, Zelensky to exonerate him.
Did you see the Latest Fauci briefing?
Skip to 7:25 mark.
Transparently fake media with a biased narrative has the fucking balls to ask Fauci this question.
Watch his visceral response to the bullshit.
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@ILikePie5
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Interesting to note how so many on the left believe people have to worship Trump to vote for Trump.
All a Trump voter really has to do is take one look at Biden, which many on the left refuses to do, which is how Biden got the nomination.
Trump takes up 99.9% of the space in a leftist's head and Biden isn't even on the cat scan.
Normal people like you and me will look and ask for alternatives. If what Trump did was bad then what would have been good? What person was willing to step up and do something more effective to combat the Covid? You can't keep running around screaming Orangemanbad if there is no alternative to what you think is "good"
Currently, our only alternative is Biden, which is unacceptable. You want us to support someone other than Trump? How about someone viable? Hell, bring back Bill Clinton. At least he knew how to get the public to believe he actually cared about the people. Biden goes out of his way to prove the opposite.
Trump isn't the president we want but he is the president we need, in the absence of any logical alternative. The left still hasn't figured out that the crony corporate DNC in bed with the MSM media is so rotten and corrupt to the core that I can't ever imagine them winning any election in the future outside of cloistered thought/gated community bubbles.
It was my hope way back in 2016 that Bernie Sanders would reform the DNC. Instead, DNC corruption has only gotten worse, as Bernie and all the other candidates that at least pretended to give a shit about the people went out with a whimper, not a bang.
Except MAYBE Tulsi Gabbard. She is a fighter. This isn't a rant about who I personally like as a leader, just an observation of how broken the system continues to be for the left.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
I would bet some countries wished the U.S. had been more isolationist rather than being invaded and or killed, funny people bitch about the conflicts the U.S. gets into, nation building etc but then turns around and bitches at people who think we should be more isolated, national.
Some people just want to sow chaos and anarchy all over the globe instead of protecting themselves.
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@RationalMadman
I would one day like Right-Wingers to explain why isolationism is morally good.
Why is Anarchy a moral good?
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@TheRealNihilist
Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
Biden wants 230 revoked because he thinks Facebook has dangerous ideas.
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@n8nrgmi
The only sure-fire way to lose your wealth is to sell when the stock hits a low point.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Have the media engaged in false equivalence when it comes to political lying? Do fact-checkers nitpick statements by Democrats in order to seem fair and balanced when they go after President Trump’s numerous and blatant falsehoods?
That proposition might seem ludicrous. After all, The Washington Post last month announced that Trump had made more than 12,000 false or misleading statements since his inauguration in 2017. Daniel Dale of CNN tracks every Trumpian falsehood — writing, for example, that the president “made at least 26 false claims” at a rally in New Mexico on Monday. PolitiFact has rated fully 69 percent of Trump’s public utterances as false to some degree, and 14 percent as being so at odds with reality that they have earned the coveted “Pants on Fire” rating.
And that’s just the tip of the journalistic iceberg. Indeed, if the media have told us anything about Trump over these past few years, it’s that he spews lies so freely that his every word and every tweet is suspect. So what do Democrats have to complain about?
This: Despite the media’s admirably tough-minded stance on Trump’s falsehoods, they are nevertheless holding Democrats to a much higher standard. Most politicians exaggerate, butcher the facts or shade the truth, and journalists should take note when they do. But the press should also be careful to point out the difference between standard-issue rhetorical excesses and the sort of gaslighting that Trump engages in on a daily basis.
Last week Michael Calderone of Politico wrote an important story about Democratic complaints regarding the fact-checkers’ embrace of false equivalence. He began with the example of Bernie Sanders’ claim that “500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column awarded three Pinocchios (out of a possible four) to Sanders — not because he was completely wrong, but because medical bills were only one factor in those 500,000 bankruptcies. Meanwhile, Calderone noted, the Post also gave Trump three Pinocchios for claiming that large swaths of his border wall have been already built when, in fact, none of it has.
The Sanders example is a matter of factual interpretation. The Trump example is somewhere between a hallucination and a lie. Yet they each got the same rating. How can this be?
One explanation is that journalism, steeped as it is in notions of fairness and balance, is unequipped for the extraordinary challenge of the Trump era. Calderone offered several other instances of Democrats’ words being parsed for shades of nuance so that they could be labeled as lies. He also wrote that “several prominent fact-checkers said they don’t believe their job has changed when it comes to holding politicians accountable for their words on the stump and in TV studios, despite Trump’s persistence falsehoods.” And he quoted PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan as saying, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” OK. But everything is not the same.
Consider an example that Calderone didn’t cite: Joe Biden’s recent mixing up of three separate stories about honoring a heroic soldier who had tried to save a comrade in Afghanistan. Yes, Biden botched it pretty badly, but the essential truth of what he was trying to say came through. Yet The Washington Post headlined it, “As he campaigns for president, Joe Biden tells a moving but false war story.” False? Not really. More like Biden being Biden, lacking the discipline to master the details and not understanding why it matters.
Or how about two years of obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s private email server while the news that Trump uses an unsecured cell phone, reported last October in The New York Times, got about two minutes’ worth of attention — even though Chinese and Russian spies were reportedly listening in on Trump’s calls.
Those last examples aren’t about lies and fact-checking. But all of this is grounded in a larger, more enduring issue — accusations of liberal bias on the part of conservatives, and the duck-and-cover response from too many journalists whose politics may indeed be liberal but who bend over backwards to torment liberal politicians. Eric Alterman, in his 2003 book, “What Liberal Media?,” called it “working the refs,” and it goes back at least to Spiro Agnew’s famous nattering nabobs of negativism speech of 1970.
In 2012 — a more innocent time — I wrote in The Huffington Post that one of the big problems with fact-checking was that politicians’ false or partly false statements were rarely full-blown lies, but that ratings like Pinocchios or “Pants on Fire” suggested that every falsehood was a lie. “The fact-checkers are shifting from judging facts to indulging in opinion, but they’re not necessarily doing it because they want to,” I wrote. “They’re doing it because politicians don’t flat-out lie as frequently as we might suppose.” Now we have a president who lies so promiscuously that the fact-checkers seek out minor factual discrepancies among Democrats so it won’t seem like they’re picking on Trump.
In a report for Harvard's Shorenstein Center, Thomas Patterson found that press coverage of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign was actually more negative than that of Trump. In other words, her emails were treated the same as or worse than her opponent's racist outbursts, the “Access Hollywood” tape, corruption at the Trump Foundation and so much more.
“Indiscriminate criticism has the effect of blurring important distinctions,” Patterson wrote. “Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump? It’s a question that journalists made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign. They reported all the ugly stuff they could find, and left it to the voters to decide what to make of it.”
Now we are moving into yet another presidential election season. The problem for 2020, as it was for 2016, isn’t that the media won’t report negative information about Trump. It’s that they will report negative information about his opponents in such a way that it all looks the same. In that respect, Democratic complaints about fact-checking that may seem trivial are actually emblematic of a much deeper problem with journalism: the primal urge to treat both sides equally, to be seen as fair, to avoid accusations of liberal bias.
It’s going to be an ugly, brutal campaign, and Trump’s going to drive the agenda once again. Are the media up to the challenge? The evidence suggests that the answer to that question is no.
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@ATroubledMan
From your source about "fact-checking" (which is really an authoritative biased partisan diatribe on opinion checking)
"We scoured news clips and could find only a couple instances of elected Democrats criticizing the president’s action to restrict travel."
They obviously didn't have enough of a confirmation bias to motivate much research I guess when the Presidential Candidate is doing it. Pretty sure Biden was elected many times.
"On the day Trump imposed the travel restrictions, Biden did criticize Trump for his “record of hysteria and xenophobia,” but it is unclear whether Biden was referring to Trump’s travel restrictions, or Trump’s overall qualifications to deal with the epidemic."
The entire "factcheck" industry is unclear because they routinely equate certain opinions with facts while arbitrarily dismissing other opinions. All factcheck sites produce pure narrative-driven political propaganda while masquerading as an authoritative source.
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@ATroubledMan
They would be wrong.
Many Democrats are really getting tired of apologizing for China and being publicly shamed for questioning China. At least the ones that identify as American first and Democrat second.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
On the other hand, there are publicly available clips of Pelosi and other Democratic leaders encouraging Americans to participate in the Chinese New year festivals. This along with the opposition to the travel bans from Wuhan.
Where is the outrage?
There is also a virtual media blackout on exposing Chinese wet-markets and discussing bat to human crossover.
Youtube will censor any content discussing it. How is this helpful to Americans?
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Fascinating the people who support China and condemn America. Truly.
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@ATroubledMan
do you find it a bit peculiar that the covid stats are quite readily available from other countries but the flu stats are not?
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@ATroubledMan
Trump fired lots of folks from the CDC and cut their funding.
And that's the only reason why we can't get information from China and other countries about the FLU?
Your Orangemanbad is showing.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
While there are many that think American Nationalism is somehow evil, they have absolutely no problems whatsoever with Chinese Nationalism, even singing praises for Chinese Nationalism.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Did you know the WHO has censored ANY data regarding COVID from Taiwan?
WHO is a fucking joke.
Shows you Trump was right. WHO has been bought and influenced by China. Cut off the funding.
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@ATroubledMan
Trump has taken 10 times more questions than any other president from MSM media who systemically report half-truths and censors things their corporate sponsors don't like.
The number one laughable charge of Trump is that he suppresses free speech when almost everyone, even many of his supporters, would want him to shut up.
CNN regularly cuts away from the president's comments on daily press briefings to deliver their own sermon instead, dictating what people need to see, hear, and think. Exactly as China's regime does.
Apples and Orangemanbads.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
I wonder how many family members are going to try to sue the governor of Michigan for negligent homicide?
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
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@ATroubledMan
Because people and governments that censor are evil liars by nature.
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@ATroubledMan
If you claim that China isn't releasing valid numbers, please do provide some evidence?
How can we possibly know when China censors information more than youtube and facebook?
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@ILikePie5
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@bmdrocks21
Here is another great propaganda video made by right-wing, racist, assholes, exposing the WHO-China connection.
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@bmdrocks21
I'm going to refuse to read that too because someone painted you with meaningless labels.
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@HistoryBuff
I refused to read what you wrote because I am going to pretend to be a Democrat for a day.
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@bmdrocks21
The party of hate, Censorship, and canceling.
:)
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@HistoryBuff
i'm not going to subject myself to videos from racist, homophobic assholes.
Why not? Don't you want to have a laugh at the people you want to kill? Hitler did.
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@bmdrocks21
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@HistoryBuff
With allies like the UN and WHO giving a pass to China for helping create and spread Covid19...who needs enemies?
What does this even mean?
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@zedvictor4
Coronavirus certainly had no respect for borders.
Coronavirus respects gloves and masks and the sun.
Those kinds of borders work.
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@Dr.Franklin
He is saying everyone should be eating tea and crumpets. Equality.
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@blamonkey
I agree it's bad for the economy, but so was ending slavery.
Sometimes you have to make a stand for something. California is so culturally different from the rest of America, neither are happy living under the same umbrella.
I actually understand and sympathize as to why California actively refuses to follow Federal Mandates.
The mandates are made more for Americans than Californians.
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@bmdrocks21
With competition, they have an incentive to undercut their competitions' prices as well, making it great for consumers. Bureaucratic institutions have an incentive to maximize costs to expand their budgets, so I'm not sure if it this may cost us more in the long-run.
Private insurers are by far the best entity at holding Hospitals accountable for finances. Far better than ANY government-run institution, as long as the government is not restricting competition as they are often paid handsomely to do by lobbyists.
If there was ever a need for anti-trust reforms, the healthcare industry is the one that needs trust busting now more than ever.
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@WaterPhoenix
Clearly what happened is that people on the left focused so much energy and capital into Orangemanbad that they didn't have much left to support a proper candidate and do the things to get essential name recognition out of many of the more competent candidates. Those candidates never broke 5% in recognition, some never broke 1%. The end result being digging up a fossil everyone can still recognize from history books.
This is what happens when there is no <insert_Democratic_Candidate>_person_good.exe program running in the foreground instead of Orangemanbad.exe hogging all the oxygen.
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@bmdrocks21
The government currently isn't stopping any state from implementing Romneycare in their state.
Why hasn't California, far more in Democrat control than Massachusetts, developed their own State healthcare plan?
Why does this have to be managed at the Federal level over so many people when it could be much more efficient governed locally?
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@Imabench
Rather than make this a giant circle jerk/celebration thread though,
Oh please, don't be modest. Show us your best Biden.
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@zedvictor4
I would expect that there are millions of people that would be more than content with what you might consider to mediocre.
This is the grand hope of every person in power.
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