monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

When freedom gets abused, it provides a justification for repressive government and it's wrong to complain about the repression without acknowledging the deeper cause, which is abuse of freedom.

Just pointing again at the fact that I responded to your post about the economy paying for a closed border by a wall ...

And as I wrote above: I live in Central Europe (Germany).

I do have some knowledge though about the drug use in the Netherlands (and a lot about it here).
It might be an abuse of freedom - to what freedom do you refer here? For instance, in the Netherlands the freedoms are verified in the Nederlandse Grondwet - Titel II - Vrijheden.

I'I'm talking about what used to be the free side of the iron curtain, because we were talking about the GDR and the Berlin wall.

We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.

We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.

We need to restrain a toddler-in-chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.

But also, we need to laugh.

There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a cabinet meeting?

Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Mr. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.

People, this is our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone. A Scot called Mr. Trump a “tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing … gibbon.”

Or take it from the Finns. When the president suggested that wildfires could be prevented by raking our forests, as he imagined the Finns did, these people showed that their reputation for humorlessness is wrong. Among the best pictures tweeted out by the Finns was that of a woman taking a vacuum to the forest floor.

Mr. Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It’s the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Mr. Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Mr. Trump.

The mockery gets to him because deep down, he knows he’s a fraud. “The Art of the Deal” was the invention of its ghostwriter. “The Apprentice” was complete fiction. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, recently told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king.”

The jesters are having their day. What was the best venting of Trump frustration in 2018? Hands down, it was Matt Damon doing the brewski-loving, head-steaming, boy-calendar-obsessed Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Nobody can order a beer without thinking of the skit.

The best comedy makes fun of the powerful and the ridiculous. Oddly, the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided this is not a year to be funny. The grim-faced hosts of the nerd prom will have a fine historian, Ron Chernow, as their speaker at the annual dinner, but no laughs, please — they’re serious journalists, after all.

In the same dour cast, colleges are no longer a source of good political satire. Lenny Bruce, now getting a revival in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” was a god with students. Today’s campus environment is a humor desert. The kids are too fragile. Mr. Bruce, who was criminally prosecuted for telling a joke about Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts, would surely be banned.

Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, “Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?” Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.’”

Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless ’em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.

So it’s encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall — please, it’s the source of our government shutdown. It’s not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It’s nothing, at this point. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” as Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.

Nancy Pelosi, the new — and this time around, well-fortified — speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. “He’s now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.” Not bad. Keep it up.

In other words, if people abuse their economic freedom to fund drug trafficking and human trafficking and all the exploitative business that goes along with those, they are hardly in a position to complain about a wall. After all, they are funding the very industries that are causing degeneracy and malevolence.

And please don't give me the perennial Dutch excuse that drugs and prostitution are 'victimless crimes.' Drugs and prostitution destroy people's lives and bank accounts, cause crime, and cause inflation with the superfluous economic transactions they generate.

I think his point is that open borders aren't good for the economy, so if you close the border, the economic benefits will pay for the wall

I said said (or thought) what you wrote in your "other words" nor did I give any Dutch excuse.

However, I would like a citation/source for this "perennial Dutch excuse".

I wouldn't know where to find a citation about it, but the traditional justification for liberal Dutch laws regarding 'sin' is that they are 'victimless crimes.' In other words, they're saying that if people want to use drugs and engage in prostitution, that's their business and they're not causing any harm.

livinglava wrote:

I wouldn't know where to find a citation about it, but the traditional justification for liberal Dutch laws regarding 'sin' is that they are 'victimless crimes.' In other words, they're saying that if people want to use drugs and engage in prostitution, that's their business and they're not causing any harm.

Now, that peculiar funny, since if it's in your own words a "traditional justification" for "liberal Dutch laws" ('liberal' Dutch laws - are you here referring to the Rijkswetten ["Kingdom"] laws, which apply to the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands or some other?). So it will be printed and published.

So it will be printed and published.

Anyway, the larger point I was making is that west Berlin was criticized for its liberalism

So the point you either made or implied (I can't remember which), was that the US having a border wall would be like the GDR having the Berlin wall.

When? By whom?

I neither made that point nor did I imply it.

The Berlin wall was just 155 km (96 mi) out of the total 1548 km (962 mi) GDR border security system on land. To this must be added the GDR border systems on the Baltic Sea and the Elbe river.

Why are you detailing this information?

Well why did you mention the GDR as having a wall in reference to the Trump wall plan then?

livinglava wrote:

I think his point is that open borders aren't good for the economy, so if you close the border, the economic benefits will pay for the wall.

The only country I know (but perhaps there were more) having had closed borders (= CLOSED BORDERS, not jus one to one country, and excluding seawalls) was the GDR between the early 1960's and 1989.
... ... ...

Walter Hinteler wrote:

When? By whom?

It doesn't matter. You don't seem to (want to) understand what I'm talking about so there's no point in discussing it further.

livinglava wrote:

Well why did you mention the GDR as having a wall in reference to the Trump wall plan then?

Because I responded to your post about open borders and economy.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

livinglava wrote:

I think his point is that open borders aren't good for the economy, so if you close the border, the economic benefits will pay for the wall.

The only country I know (but perhaps there were more) having had closed borders (= CLOSED BORDERS, not jus one to one country, and excluding seawalls) was the GDR between the early 1960's and 1989.
... ... ...

livinglava wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:

When? By whom?

It doesn't matter. You don't seem to (want to) understand what I'm talking about so there's no point in discussing it further.

I kindly ask you again - since it is "the larger point" you made - when and by whom "west Berlin was criticized for its liberalism".
Might be that I understand it then.

What was your point in mentioning the GDR except to associate the US border wall plan with a repressive Soviet-era divided Germany?