Aceticon

This poster Romans!

Santa is gonna be getting a piece of coal this Christmas ... and it will be worth it.

"Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to 'once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades' and return home with a warm 'at least it's not us' feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place"

Well, that's definitelly going to solve the fall in Tourism problem in the US /s

The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out.

And don't get me started on things like the relative ratios of "death by police" and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe.

The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to "create far right parties" and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit).

In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.

Personally I've been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act.

Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US.

The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller's mobile phones and computers way back in Bush's day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they're open about what they're looking for.

If I got a cent for every time Germany backed a Holocaust, I would have two cents, which isn't much but it's still strange they did something like that twice.

Kudos for Iceland.

So far it's a disgracefully short list of Western nations willing to do merely the easiest simplest most symbolic of actions imaginable of shunning the mass murdering new-Nazi state of Israel in a frigging song contest.

Remember this next time the regularly talk of "bringing Freedom and Democracy" is coming out from the usual French, British, German (to name just the 3 largest European nations by population in Eurovision) bullshit mongers and all other such sociopath warmongering politicians in the West.

Millions of WWII veterans are turning on their graves at how the NAZIs of this era own politicians in most of the West.

Mate, I'm not the person who answered your original comment.

I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned about how they were the ones being fallacious when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of "evidence" that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman's "pretty good track record" (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is commonly misportrayed as a genuine Nobel Prize - even by Krugman himself - when it is no such thing.

Of all the things to use to claim somebody has a "pretty good track record", him having something he himself calls a Nobel Prize which is not in fact a Nobel Prize actually weakens that point rather than strengthens it, as it casts suspicion on his honesty.

As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman's opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same Industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist "who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns". One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall, wait to see what sticks and then claim he was a genius for spotting it.

I'll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and absent all those words of praise for the person making that point, just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.

Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person's authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum.

Without that first paragraph on your post you would've been right to claim Ad Hominum.

I think the biggest difference here is that the people who "got scammed" didn't just made a choice for themselves, they also made a choice for others.

Morally somebody who got conned out of their own life savings is one thing, somebody who got lots of people (including themselves) conned out of their life savings (and in some cases, their actual lives) is something very different.

As I see it, it boils down to people going with "I feel like", "Random post on the Internet told me" or equivalent non-info to chose the person to be in charge of running a whole damn country for the next 4 years.

Absolutely, if you're choosing something for yourself alone, go crazy, do stupid shit, whatever.

However if you're also choosing for others, if you can't make an informed choice, at least make no choice at all.

I don't really count special surveillance courts with closed door sessions and secret rulings as Judicial oversight - that shit is a theater of justice meant to disguise authoritarianism as Democracy, not real Justice with all the requirements of it.

So, does this one have real Judicial oversight or is it something that operates without court oversight or under the "oversight" of special courts setup for the purpose of whitewashing bulk surveillance that don't actually operate like real ones?