The funny part is the common perception that MSM outlets sensationalize everything to increase revenue. On the contrary, the MSM frequently de-sensationalizes stories to make less money while shaping The Narrative.
Sort of like how there’s lots of dollars Hollywood doesn’t want, like the money from The Passion of the Christ, or from following the trail blazed by 300.
Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies.
That’s the beauty of Trump’s candidacy; we get to show that we’ll gladly choose the Carney Barker with halfway decent political positions over the hostile Republican elite. This is kind of the point.
the pope was right.there is little evidence that Donald is a practising Christian.
The pope’s a heretic.
Like Sellar and Yeatman, sometimes Steve writes to console his readers. Getting in a front-page fight with the Pope is monumentally stupid. If Trump were a stock, even the dullest brokerage on Wall Street would be dumping it by now.
No, the pope clearly did Trump a favor. Even NPR agreed (NPR!). Yesterday they had several bites of how this will actually help Trump. One was from Carol Swain, which had me gobsmacked. She managed to properly encapsulate Trump’s appeal in about 30 seconds, in her usual astoundingly unbiased style.
I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.
You’ve got to be uninterested in history to miss Al-Andalus and the Reconquista. We’re talking the better part of a millennium of European history here.
I’m waiting for “Rehmat” to charge in and tell us it was the Pope’s army who attacked the peaceful Muslims vacationing in Rome that year.
Rehmat doesn’t get many (any?) posts in Steve’s bailiwick.
So, are you [Corvinus] simple or disingenuous?
He’s a bit of both, I think, but heavy on the latter.
Yeah, ’cause he’ll turn off Hispanic voters, who, as every Republican knows, are the key to electoral victory…
If memory serves, Trump has gotten way more hispanic votes than Cruz or Rubio.
[Sound of "Family Feud" buzzer]. Wrong. Trump did make a guarantee. He himself said such an event would not have happened. It’s in the King’s English, Fiddler.
Trump–”I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.”
You heard it here first: Trump’s going to lose the ‘sperg vote.
Do you understand the notion of political rhetoric, or are you too befuddled by your Aspie literalness to understand anything at all?
His neuro-atypicality seems genuine. Otherwise he’d know his ‘sperg style isn’t persuasive.
“How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
He should have taken her to school for saying the pope “hates.”
* It seems clear that it is in the best interest of American citizens to close the southern border, although many people disagree with that (I do not know if you are one of those who disagree). Likewise it seems to be in the best interests of a certain class of Hispanic/Latino people to come to America, legally or illegally. If you grant that these two interests are at loggerheads, why wouldn’t you say that it is appropriate for Americans (or whomever you think should fill the thought experiment) to prioritize their self-interest over that of another? Unless you are a troll, which I cannot tell, do you admit that there isn’t a Kantian-style solution for political problems, wherein everybody obeys an a priori, universal rule? Or do you think that everyone, everywhere, should act with perfect logical consistency, as if no natural groupings of people were possible? This crowd, myself included, take a principled stance against the idea that people are only distinct according to number: we believe that there are many natural groupings to be made within the larger group of humanity, and I think we have good arguments to prove that that is more than a belief. I am not trying to be patronizing, but the nature of the commenting system is that a person can only have the appearance of being reactive. What are your beliefs?
* Interesting how this Islamic Sack of Rome has been ignored by PC scholars and academics who fall over one another in their op stampede to blame modern Muslim aggression on the Crusades. Of course these proponents of Doublethink fail to mention that the first crusade was launched three centuries after the Saracens invaded and occupied southern Italy and Iberia. And it was from their base in Sicily that the warriors of Allah attacked Rome and began devastating towns and villages all over the Mediterranean murdering and enslaving the luckless inhabitants. Fortunately for Europe the Normans defeated the Moorish Sicilians in the 11th century.
* A couple of comments about setting expectations for “Casablanca:”
- The quality of dialog varies more than in just about any other movie. The best lines are maybe the best ever, but other lines are really corny.
- The emotional intensity is not high for about the first 45 minutes, until the song kicks in. “Casablanca” owes more to “As Time Goes By” than perhaps any other movie owes to any other theme song.
In general, “Casablanca” is a bit of a hodge-podge that happened to come together as a great movie at the last moment.
It was popular and respected on its first release (winning Best Picture for 1942), but its modern reputation derives in part from it becoming a cult film for Harvard students in the late 1950s when the Brattle Theater started playing Bogart films during finals week.
In general, everybody involved in “Casablanca” was kind of winging it.
* I’d never heard of the Islamic sack of Rome in 846 until 24 hours ago. I could give you the exact dates of two others: 410 AD and 1527, and approximate one other 390 BC. But the Arabs looting Rome, at least the parts outside the walls, in 846 AD was news to me, and I’m relatively well informed.
Granted, that was during the Dark Ages. But then Pirenne argued that the Dark Ages were dark in Europe because the Muslims transformed the Mediterranean from a highway into a danger zone for Europeans.
The Romans could travel by land because they had the organization to keep up the roads. When the Germans took over Europe, they didn’t have the societal competence to keep up the roads. Still, they could use the Mediterranean, which is amazingly useful. But then Muslim pirates took over the sea.
* Viktor Lazlo was apparently based on Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, a Eurasian aristocrat involved with various international agencies, who advocated for race-mixing to occur between White and dark gentiles. He wanted the goyish races to mix in order to produce a common mulatto race which could be ruled over by a pure-blood Jewish elite (Coudenhove-Kalergi was not himself Jewish).
* Japan has very strict immigration policies. As a result, Muslims are not admitted and the last major terrorist attack inside that country occurred about a fifth of a century ago in the Tokyo subway – committed by some crazy, and very rare, native cult. Japan has gotten perfect safety and cultural homogeneity all for the price of missing out on a little virtue signaling. Works for them. In the mean-time, the West has suffered riots, assassinations (Theo Van Gogh), numerous shootings and terrorist attacks using explosives and automatic/semiautomatic rifles, large numbers of rapes and sexual assaults, crime...
* The dark-haired woman in ABBA, had a Norwegian mother (non-Lebensborn, I think though) and a German-soldier father. After the war, her mother fled with her to Sweden where opinions were less polarized and there was less social rejection. At one point, ABBA was supposed to be second only to Volvo, in terms of Swedish export earnings. So this was at least one case where Sweden overwhelmingly benefited from its policy of open-mindedness and acceptance of immigrants.
* Since we’re observing the one hundred year anniversary of World War I, I’ve often asked myself similar questions. How would the United States have been adversely affected by a German victory in World War I. Without U.S. intervention, that seems quite likely. By the spring of 1918 Russia was out of the war, the French Army was in various stages of mutiny and almost incapable of offensive action. The British were still in it, but the losses at Third Ypres had been almost catastrophic. The Germans came very close to winning in the 1918 Kaiserschlacht.
But how would a Europe dominated by Germany have posed a threat to North America; hard now for me to see!
* Or would WWI have dragged on into 1919 without American intervention? The German offensive to take Paris in the spring of 1918 before the Americans really arrived in large numbers seems to have petered out about 70 miles outside of Paris. The defense had the upper hand at that point in history, so it’s not clear that anybody would have won if the U.S. stayed out.
Perhaps without U.S. intervention the war would have dragged on into 1919 or 1920 and ended with Communists overthrowing the governments in Berlin and Paris, and perhaps London?
