1. #17941
    Swollen Member GOLGO 13's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    That won’t happen anytime soon, if at all because Republicans still need the support of Trump’s base. Like I’ve said more times than I can count, Trump’s cultists are loyal to him, not the GOP, if they lose those voters, the party will be sunk for years to come.
    Every last one of them is a Nazi of the lowest order. Hate consumes them.

  2. #17942
    Swollen Member GOLGO 13's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by KOSLOX View Post
    They better keep their asses at home, and wait for a vaccine rather than showing up at Trump’s death rallies. Otherwise that will prove a pretty idle threat.
    Felons aren't allowed to be the POTUS. NY will see to that.

  3. #17943
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    Quote Originally Posted by GOLGO 13 View Post
    Every last one of them is a Nazi of the lowest order. Hate consumes them.
    Growing up, I was (and still am) under the impression that hatred requires passion. Like, the "it's personal" sort of thing. That said, you don't necessarily need to "have it out" for someone to be willing to douse them in gasoline and burn them alive. Even less when you sign a multi-page document authorizing someone else to do it hundreds or thousands of miles away. The approach can be frighteningly offhanded.
    Last edited by Ragged Maw; 11-24-2020 at 06:24 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    I thought this was funny.

    Oh, so when your country doesn't have leaders beholden to Russia, you get 10 years added to your life expectancy?

    Good thing we're getting rid of Trump, then.
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  5. #17945
    Silver Sentinel BeastieRunner's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Oh, so when your country doesn't have leaders beholden to Russia, you get 10 years added to your life expectancy?

    Good thing we're getting rid of Trump, then.
    LOL!

    This is the best take.
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  6. #17946

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    Quote Originally Posted by BeastieRunner View Post
    The party is already sunk.

    Give it another 1-2 POTUS election cycles.
    not really sunk-- not as long as gerrymandered districts in states still exist, plus "true believers" among governors and senate members--
    and as long as there are cohorts of friends and family (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly) who tend to vote for "whiteness" for their elected representatives, things won't really be getting any better-- you're still going to have outsized influence from comparatively sparsely populated states like Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.

    “Whiteness”, in this case, isn’t particularly a reference to skin color. Nobody has to be an open KKK supporter to vote for "whiteness". Instead, it is the aggregation of narratives, starting at the beginning of this nation in 1619, that colonization and Manifest Destiny were natural outgrowths of the advancement of a culture. The conceits that still largely attribute a recurring innocence to the motives of the actors that achieved “great” things for a particular cohort of people, while other cohorts of people were deliberately left out, actively attacked, or both. These narratives, gradually assimilated and both implicitly and explicitly reiterated, have led to the ethnocentric conclusions that people of America have about themselves.

    Until this is directly and consistently confronted, including primarily by co-members of the dominant culture, it will continue to fester. Cycles of people will continue to believe in Q-Anon, Barack Obama will continue to being the secret Kenyan bogeyman hired by Iran, and other scurrilous, anti-intellectual notions will inform their political choices. The results of the 2020 election proved that more white people are willing to double-triple-quadruple-quintuple-down on gallingly bad candidates because they refuse to let go of "being white" above anything else, including their own health and welfare.

  7. #17947
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    An ancient people with a modern climate plan

    After a brutal storm in 2006, the Swinomish tribe off the coast of Washington state launched a strategy to deal with the effects of a warming planet. Now, 50 other native tribes have followed suit.
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  8. #17948
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hypestyle View Post
    not really sunk-- not as long as gerrymandered districts in states still exist, plus "true believers" among governors and senate members--
    and as long as there are cohorts of friends and family (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly) who tend to vote for "whiteness" for their elected representatives, things won't really be getting any better-- you're still going to have outsized influence from comparatively sparsely populated states like Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.

    “Whiteness”, in this case, isn’t particularly a reference to skin color. Nobody has to be an open KKK supporter to vote for "whiteness". Instead, it is the aggregation of narratives, starting at the beginning of this nation in 1619, that colonization and Manifest Destiny were natural outgrowths of the advancement of a culture. The conceits that still largely attribute a recurring innocence to the motives of the actors that achieved “great” things for a particular cohort of people, while other cohorts of people were deliberately left out, actively attacked, or both. These narratives, gradually assimilated and both implicitly and explicitly reiterated, have led to the ethnocentric conclusions that people of America have about themselves.

    Until this is directly and consistently confronted, including primarily by co-members of the dominant culture, it will continue to fester. Cycles of people will continue to believe in Q-Anon, Barack Obama will continue to being the secret Kenyan bogeyman hired by Iran, and other scurrilous, anti-intellectual notions will inform their political choices. The results of the 2020 election proved that more white people are willing to double-triple-quadruple-quintuple-down on gallingly bad candidates because they refuse to let go of "being white" above anything else, including their own health and welfare.
    If we don't see a GOP split, and the end of the corrosive 2-party system by 2023, we are well and truly buggered.

  9. #17949
    Amazing Member Adam Allen's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by PwrdOn View Post
    You can't really compare Bernie to Trump though, because the Bernie campaign wasn't really about him personally the same way that it is for Trump, his supporters just liked the policies he was advocating, and if someone else were to advocate for those same policies it's not hard to imagine the Bernie Bros switching their support to that candidate. Bernie himself isn't terribly charismatic and tends to just repeat the same talking points over and over again, and of course being yet another crusty old white dude he doesn't really represent his base which tends to be younger and more diverse. And I really have a hard time seeing Bernie's run as being some kind of self-aggrandizing project, even people who hate him have to admit that he was only running because he wanted to be able to implement the platform he's spent his whole career pushing for, not because he's obsessed with media attention or building some kind of legacy the same way that so many politicians are.

    And frankly, I don't understand why moderate Democrats are always trying to appeal to some nonexistent referee of election etiquette or whatever. They've been trying that line ever since Trump has entered office, acting all shocked and horrified every time he breaks with some unwritten convention, and invariably nothing comes of that because there's nobody who is going to step in and enforce these standards. Yeah Trump should have conceded by now but we all kind of knew that he was going to go quietly and, as long as he's still President, there isn't anyone that can just force him to concede or make the transition to Biden's administration any easier. And yeah this sets all kinds of troubling precedents and is probably not good either for the health of our democracy or our international reputation, but Trump is really just a symptom of the systemic rot of our sociopolitical structure, and these problems won't be fixed if he were to just concede the election and leave office gracefully.
    I think we are in agreement about Sanders and his supporters. It is not that I think there's a parallel there to Trump and his supporters, but that I've seen others make that claim; that it's also just a cult of personality, Bernie is motivated by ego and power like Trump, and his supporters are just as blindly loyal. I don't think any of that is true. That was actually my point about the theoretical situation where Bernie had become president, but then like Trump decided to try and subvert the election process to stay in power. I don't really see people sticking with him for that, but I also think the whole "Bernie Bro" label was created to suggest it was about him, not his political stances. Again, I don't really think that's the case. I don't think Bernie's fans would have remained stupidly devoted to him through even half the things Trump has gotten away with.

    And no, Trump the individual is not the problem. Or, he is a problem, but just the tip of that particular iceberg. The entire Republican party is in lockstep behind him, and 70 million people wanted to give him another four years, despite the country being a disaster, compared to four years ago. It's really kind of inconceivable to me that people support him. Or Republicans in general at this point, really.
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  10. #17950
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    Why is the word *******ph censored?
    Last edited by Farealmer; 11-24-2020 at 06:02 PM.

  11. #17951
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    Quote Originally Posted by BeastieRunner View Post
    The party is already sunk.

    Give it another 1-2 POTUS election cycles.
    That's what people thought with W,. when he lost and the party went into the wilderness. That's how we got Trump.

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  13. #17953
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ragged Maw View Post
    Growing up, I was (and still am) under the impression that hatred requires passion. Like, the "it's personal" sort of thing. That said, you don't necessarily need to "have it out" for someone to be willing to douse them in gasoline and burn them alive. Even less when you sign a multi-page document authorizing someone else to do it hundreds or thousands of miles away.
    I tend to think that a lot of the passion fo hate can be born from denial in the modern era - people who didn’t waste time and energy hating others are confronted with a reality that demands some hard questions and answers, not just about themselves but about people they love and respect, and once that is revealed, the energy emerges because facing the truth is too painful for them.

    Squaring with the fact Thomas Jefferson was likely a rapist because he came from a community and culture completely fine with that and that in some ways encouraged it, and that our culture descends from that and still has much of that apathy and sadism left over, for instance, is a hard thing when you also want to honor his for the good things he did as well that helped form the better aspect of out culture.

    And he’s a guy who’s been dead for about two centuries. It’s a much harder thing to look at people you know and love now, and yourself, and be told “You are actively allowing or encouraging evil to be perpetrated for your own benefit,” particularly if they were things that you unconsciously supported or allowed or were raised to think were right or justified.
    Last edited by godisawesome; 11-24-2020 at 06:26 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    I tend to think that a lot of the passion fo hate can be born from denial in the modern era - people who didn’t waste time and energy hating others are confronted with a reality that demands some hard questions and answers, not just about themselves but about people they love and respect, and once that is revealed, the energy emerges because facing the truth is too painful for them.

    Squaring with the fact Thomas Jefferson was likely a rapist because he came from a community and culture completely fine with that and that in some ways encouraged it, and that our culture descends from that and still has much of that apathy and sadism left over, for instance, is a hard thing when you also want to honor his for the good things he did as well that helped form the better aspect of out culture.

    And he’s a guy who’s been dead for about two centuries. It’s a much harder thing to look at people you know and live now, and yourself, and be told “You are actively allowing or encouraging evil to be perpetrated for your own benefit.”
    Very well put, especially that first part. It's like a primal failsafe that - for whatever adaptive reason that may have been advantageous in the distant past but much less so today - drives one to "stay the course" rather than change direction in terms of mindset.
    Last edited by Ragged Maw; 11-24-2020 at 06:39 PM.

  15. #17955
    Amazing Member Adam Allen's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    The Justice Department investigation was pretty clear that there were systematic civil rights violations in Ferguson, and this problem was not exclusive to Ferguson, so I certainly agree that we can't ignore that. But elected officials should not reference a debunked narrative, especially if you expect elected officials to tell their supporters inconvenient truths.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-violence.html

    I'm not sure Democrats would react differently in an alternate scenario, where a Sanders type (let's assume a Bernie Sanders young enough to run again in 2024) was issuing legal challenges despite clearly losing an election. Would the leadership really be willing to alienate the supporters of their President?

    As an example of this, we could consider how the party insisted that Ralph Northam resign as Governor of Virginia until it turned out that it might lead to a Republican taking over.
    I don't know what elected officials are referencing a debunked narrative, but I guess I could agree they shouldn't do that? I mean, I feel like I see/hear "I can't breathe" a lot more than "Hands Up Don't Shoot" ... and I mean, I read your referenced article there, and for one I don't even know if I would say Mike Brown has ever been the most "iconic case" of police killing an innocent man. There were questions/disagreements about what happened there from almost the very start, while numerous other cases of people killed have video recordings showing they were shot in the back or not fighting like Eric Garner. I mean, as of 2020, pretty sure I would say that George Floyd is now your most iconic case. And I mean, before him ... not recorded on video, but Philando Castile was shot and killed for no reason, with a four year old in the back seat, in the same city as George Floyd, just four years ago.

    I don't feel like I see people talk about Mike Brown more than these other cases, and as far as even Brown himself, I would again say that I think that focusing on the specific details of his hands being up or not kind of misses the larger point of why Ferguson exploded after his death. It wasn't just about whether he was surrendering, and as well, I don't see how you could possibly want to separate what happened with Brown and Wilson from the larger picture of harassment, brutality, and exploitation that surrounded it. Like, I appreciate your saying we shouldn't ignore the civil rights violations, but the fact is that those violations would never have become widespread knowledge if not for the response to Mike Brown's death.

    As well, even for Mike Brown himself, he didn't need to be an angel or a "gentle giant", but I personally find it hard to consider him worse than Kyle Rittenhouse, who not only was not killed, but has had millions donated for his defense. That disturbs me a lot more than whether people want to say "Hands Up Don't Shoot".

    Anyway, you are free to doubt that Democrats would abandon Bernie (or someone similar) once he was the clear loser, but I think they would ... to your question, no, I don't think they'd be eager to alienate his supporters, but this is an area where I think Democrat supporters would just be different than Republican supporters. You have to remember all the "they go low, we go high" crap. Democrats would think it more important to emphasize that they have faith in the political process of democracy or whatever, than suggesting it should be undermined to support a single individual. Like, another place you would have seen a difference -- for one, Democrats would not have blocked a Supreme Court nominee as long as the Republicans did with Obama, but if they had done that just four years ago, they would not be so blatantly hypocritical as the Republicans were with Barrett. The Democrats just are not as shameless. I could almost wish they were honestly, because I don't know how you beat cheaters if you insist on playing fair. But, principles or something, I guess.

    I'm really not familiar with Ralph Northam, so no comment, there.
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