u.s. politics: sundowning on the american empire

[Centrist Simon Steele]

5 hours ago, Raja said:

I see people are talking about Shapiro's 'intellect' - I will *always* post this when that goon is brought up ( it's only about 30 seconds)

Edit: Here's the full video, for people that are curious

How do you even respond to this? Well, let me try. First off, who will they sell their homes to? Mermaids? Aquaman? Let's play his hypothetical game and say they could just sell their home in the new aquatic real estate market. What about the majority of poor and working class folk who don't own homes? Will they at least get their deposits back for a relocation away from the home they lived in and couldn't afford to move from?

The guy is an absolute fucking moron.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Your point was she should target the AA community in SC exclusively. 

No, my point was that she shouldn't be going after white male conservatives. The idea that because I said that you think I said she should only be going after AA community is telling. 

1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

 I'm not denying Iowa is different - I'm saying that slicing and dicing voters into white, male and conservative and writing that constituency off is not the ideal strategy for the SC open primary. 

It is literally what has worked for the last 7 Democratic primary winners in South Carolina. And all of those ended up winning the primary in general. 

1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

 If for no other reason than because the many serving and retired members of the military living in SC deserve a commander in chief who is worthy of their service. 

They should probably not have voted for Trump then. 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

You aren't her market. 

You’d still think I’d see some of her adverts here or there.  I do frequent fairly left of center discussion forums.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Anyone who thinks academia is a hot bed of radical left indoctrination hasn't been on a campus in years, if ever.  It's the 1 percenters who have been putting up the buildings, changing the curriculums and fostering the ridiculous economic theories as facts such as trickle down etc.  They have been buying the damned schools, sponsoring 'chairs' and 'think tanks' and 'fellowships.'  They own the sciences and technology.  The humanities are essentially gone from the curriculums everywhere.  Many smaller schools have eradicated English and Literature and History -- and particularly languages -- all together.

Students even at the best academic institutions these days, absolutely refuse to even read a book.  Books are gone from the library shelves.  The building instead is a vast study hall filled with terrified Asian students beavering away on their laptops, eating eating eating and drinking, and the smell of that food stinks up the place.

P.S.  If, indeed, Biden takes the nom, the VP choice truly matters.  But, this is a year, in which the running mate of whomever receives the Dem nom will matter.  There's a great field for VP, at least.

It's true. I mean, I know Peterson was a professor (I guess? He's a fuckin' idiot), but students don't read shit anymore. I don't fully blame them. A lot of them are working close to 40 hours a week and taking 18 credit hours so they can graduate on time with as little debt as possible. But they ain't doing the readings that would indoctrinate them in the first place. As someone from the social sciences and humanities, and who does his reading, I don't see a lot of these neo-Marxist-postmodernist readings anyway.

[Kalbear]

16 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You’d still think I’d see some of her adverts here or there.  I do frequent fairly left of center discussion forums.

She isn't doing a lot of advertising. She's doing a lot of outreach and in-person visits with community leaders. Advertisements will be closer to the actual date. No reason to advertise 6 months before the primary. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

There are far fewer elected officials than I would like.  But there are plenty of ordinary voters who voted Republican in 2016 and who Democrats should be trying to persuade to vote for them.  

Your point was she should target the AA community in SC exclusively.  I'm not denying Iowa is different - I'm saying that slicing and dicing voters into white, male and conservative and writing that constituency off is not the ideal strategy for the SC open primary.  If for no other reason than because the many serving and retired members of the military living in SC deserve a commander in chief who is worthy of their service. 

Anyway, I'm curious to hear Ser Scott's view.  Would he vote for Kamala or any Democrat in the primary?

I really might.  I’m tempted by Harris more than Warren or Sanders.  I’m opposed to Trump and I want him out of office in 2021.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

She isn't doing a lot of advertising. She's doing a lot of outreach and in-person visits with community leaders. Advertisements will be closer to the actual date. No reason to advertise 6 months before the primary. 

Very smart.  I like that.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

36 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You’d still think I’d see some of her adverts here or there.  I do frequent fairly left of center discussion forums.

Random question: Do you work at a law firm or for a corporation?

[DMC]

37 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I do frequent fairly left of center discussion forums.

You do?  That's crazy, I can't imagine you participating in any left of center discussion forums.

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

No reason to advertise 6 months before the primary. 

Not so sure about that, especially in SC.  It'd be useful to maybe have some introductory/personal ads right now to familiarize herself with the electorate - particularly because Biden's name ID and familiarity is her biggest obstacle to capturing SC's black vote.

[Mudguard]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Students even at the best academic institutions these days, absolutely refuse to even read a book.  Books are gone from the library shelves.  The building instead is a vast study hall filled with terrified Asian students beavering away on their laptops, eating eating eating and drinking, and the smell of that food stinks up the place.

This is racist and offensive.  It also has nothing to do with your argument that universities are not a hot bed of radical left indoctrination.  Why even include this statement?  What do you have against Asians?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

37 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Random question: Do you work at a law firm or for a corporation?

I worked for a law firm until last October.  Since then I have been employed as a “corporate counsel”.

[sologdin]

universities are not a hot bed of radical left indoctrination

am not sure why anyone would need to prove this.  it strikes me as incumbent upon the rightwing to show how a university curriculum that is not 100% rightwing and which is subject to reasonable controversion as a matter of course is somehow indoctrination when almost all of the matriculants had already been exposed to church and the philistine bourgeois press and monologic education systems and other asinine sources of actual interpellative indoctrination, which sources are almost never subject to controversion, for almost all of the least independent times in their respective lives. 

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Simon Steele said:

It's true. I mean, I know Peterson was a professor (I guess? He's a fuckin' idiot), but students don't read shit anymore. I don't fully blame them. A lot of them are working close to 40 hours a week and taking 18 credit hours so they can graduate on time with as little debt as possible. But they ain't doing the readings that would indoctrinate them in the first place. As someone from the social sciences and humanities, and who does his reading, I don't see a lot of these neo-Marxist-postmodernist readings anyway.

Can't say I necessarily agree with this in my experience.  When I taught community college, yeah.  But at the university I'm at, most students probably don't do any reading until the tests, but there's always at least a handful that participate in discussions and clearly at least skimmed the material.  Even the empirical articles from scholarly journals I'll assign which are pretty tough for an undergrad.

[Varysblackfyre321]

4 hours ago, Bonnot OG said:

and some here over the past two years told me they were just a fringe element. There are literal neo nazi in the state department 

 

 

And Trump was outraged-that such a fine patriot wasn’t brought to his attention sooner, and immediately promoted this white-supremacist. Kidding sorta. I’d be genuinely a little surprised if Trump does anything as a result of this story instead of treating it like one of his retweets of literal nazis-just don’t address it long enough till people forget it’s there-hell till people think it’s normal to be there.

6 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

This is the shit conservatives would pull in previous eras. And it was effective. That of course was before the tiki-torch marching Nazis and the vicious murder of Heather Heyer and the government putting brown kids in cages.  We've gone as a country from questioning if white supremacy is that common to realizing it exists and questioning how much power the movement will gain and how much damage it will do to the country.

But, the gaslighting must continue, it is the Fox News bread and butter.

 

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Says White Supremacy Is a “Hoax” and a “Conspiracy Theory”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/fox-news-tucker-carlson-white-supremacy-hoax-conspiracy-theory.html

 

He does this at the same time bemoaning how those non-white Immigrants are damaging America’s culture yet never really going into details on how-like what specific and for that matter significant cultural values would these mostly hardworking, Christian,secular, people be threatening isn’t really extrapolated-just vague sayings of “it’ll be different” and “there will be change”.

Oh and bemoaning demographic shifts having guests on who literally argue it being for things like government to treat all black men like criminals because some are guilty of crimes,without giving a rebuke, and tweeting literal white-nationalist websites.

A lot of White-supremacists really don’t want white-supremacy to be a strong movement in this country until they’ve already established themselves in a position of power to where their opposition can’t do much.

 

On 8/5/2019 at 12:28 PM, TrueMetis said:

Funnily enough (not actually), many of those who fled Russia settled in Germany trying to escape that persecution. The Nazi's then used that to stoke antisemitism. Oh it wasn't all Jews, just those foreign refugees. They're the bad ones, they're causing crime, and taking native German's jobs. And mostly, they aren't integrating into German culture.

Didn't take very long for it to go from just the refugee's are the problem to all Jews are the problem.

To the bolded: I cannot help but think of those Pro-nazi Jew groups that stressed that if other Jews simply got along with German culture everything would be perfect for them. Idiots, who couldn’t realize no matter how they acted-no matter if they held the right beliefs, no matter what they did, they would still be seen as subhuman because of their race.

 

[Fez]

4 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Where are the conservatives who haven't tainted themselves through association with the diseased Republican Party? Are they hunkered down with martinis in George Will's basement?

Well, how strongly do you feel about the fellas that helped start the Iraq War?

David Frum, Bill Kristol, etc.

[DanteGabriel]

12 minutes ago, Fez said:

Well, how strongly do you feel about the fellas that helped start the Iraq War?

David Frum, Bill Kristol, etc.

The whole party has been so disastrously wrong on so many important issues for so long that I don't really think any of them are untainted. Frum and Kristol can go fuck themselves with David Brooks' overpolished noggin.

My point is -- in a party that's at something like 90% approval for Trump, what the fuck remains that is worth saving? Even the ones that don't like Trump, for whatever reasons, previously signed on for endless war, climate change denial, supply side snake oil, and crushing the rights of marginalized people. Why do we act like there are principled "conservatives" still worth saving? I am tired of grading these stupid grasping shitheels on a curve.

[KingintheNorth4]

5 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Where are the conservatives who haven't tainted themselves through association with the diseased Republican Party? Are they hunkered down with martinis in George Will's basement?

You'd have better luck finding a Unicorn.

[DMC]

28 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Even the ones that don't like Trump, for whatever reasons, previously signed on for endless war, climate change denial, supply side snake oil, and crushing the rights of marginalized people. Why do we act like there are principled "conservatives" still worth saving? I am tired of grading these stupid grasping shitheels on a curve.

Yeah, the intellectual class of the "never Trumpers" can still all go eat a dick as far as I'm concerned.  They were all either enthusiasts or apologists for Dubya, and it's not like just because Trump is worse anyone should forget how much they contributed to fucking this country and especially aiding in creating how fucked up their party is to get to the point where Trump has 90% approval.

[Seli]

On 8/5/2019 at 5:12 PM, Fez said:

Well, no. Because suicide is a mental health issue. Full stop. And can be addressed with mental health solutions.

Also, fine, even if you count the suicides; the gun violence rate decreased from 15.2 in 1993 to 10.5 in 2014. A decline. Which is exactly what I said.

ETA: It's also worth noting that the overall US suicide rate has been on the rise since 1996. The gun suicide rate is not on the rise. In fact, while I said it's steady, it's actually slightly declined, from 7.3 in 1993 to 6.7 in 2014. Guns aren't driving the increase in suicide rates.

Dropping of per capita gun suicides makes sense, considering gun ownership is dropping as well and suicide(by gun) is an impulsive action facilitated by access. This in contrast to mass shootings, which are planned.

[Varysblackfyre321]

Micheal Weiner cries Trump made a mistake in saying White-supremacists is bad.

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-savage/michael-savage-i-was-very-disappointed-president-attacking-white-supremacy

He’s right on them being a significant part of Trump’s support(to say the least), though I do think he’s wrong in anyone leaving Trump over this. They(white-supremacists), know the drill, Trump has to say White-supremacy is bad to appease the “normies”. 

I wonder if Weiner forgets he’s Jewish sometimes. Or if he truly hates himself so much. Because he legitimately seems to be angry that the president of the US is saying white-supremacists-the people who would kill him for being a dirty Jew with no remorse-are bad.