US Politics: A democratic election Prospect Theory and practice

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, horangi said:

I'm getting it as well.  Just so long as it doesn't start asking me to pick out crosswalks and fire hydrants I am OK. Because I am most definitely not a human according to that test.

I just checked about the loading etc. in Firefox.  One is requested to verify humanity there too, but it loads the threads and so on as fast it used to do with Chrome.  One can twiddling for a minute in Chrome before anything happens.  Does anyone know what's going on?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

I'm sure that what you describe is also true, but there are definitely Buddhists who recognize various deities.  Whether or not that makes them theists or their practice of Buddhism theistic vs atheistic I couldn't really say.  I suppose it would depend on a few different things.

It's very common for Buddhism and Hinduism to be practiced together. I also think like you said it's common for Buddhist temples to have Hindu shrines to be welcoming even if that specific temple is not teaching the religion. 

36 minutes ago, Ormond said:

The idea that most Buddhists are "atheists" seems to be a big misunderstanding to me. Buddhism may not have a "Creator God" concept or an idea that there is a God/Goddess who is omniscient or omnoipotent, but they certainly have a belief in a separate realm of spiritual existence where there are many powerful beings -- often specifically called gods or goddesses -- who can have some influence on humans. Wikipedia has an article on Buddist dieties that explains the variety of such beings that many Buddhists believe in.  There are probably some highly educated and sophisticated Buddhists who would accept "atheist" as a self-definition, but they would be a minority among adherents of that religion. For the most part, people who call Buddhists "atheists" are adherents of Western religions who think if you don't believe in an omnipotent Creator you are an "atheist", which would make all sorts of polytheists "atheists", which seems untenable to me. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_deities

 

I don't believe I said most. I was just making the point that one can both say they follow a religion and also be an atheist.

As to polytheism, many religions that subscribe to this have one god that is the creator. Likewise some monotheistic religions could be interpreted to have demigods. I wouldn't call most polytheists atheists.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

22 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Trump Bibles make a mockery of Christianity — and that's exactly why MAGA will eat them up
Faith without morality or theology, much less that "soyboy" Jesus? Sign MAGA Republicans up!

 The teachings of Jesus Christ were always a poor fit for Republicans. They're just way more into decimating Social Security than they are into loaves and fishes. What Trump offers when it comes to Christianity is what he offers his followers in every other aspect: permission to stop pretending to be good people. His gift to them is his shamelessness. Through Trump, his followers can realize their fantasies of being unapologetic bullies. This is the same schtick as MAGA members who claim to be "patriots" while attacking the rule of law and democracy. Trump tells them what they want to hear: You can be a Christian without compassion.  

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/28/bibles-make-a-mockery-of-christianity--and-thats-exactly-why-maga-will-eat-them-up/

 

The complete contradiction of supporting Trump and being Christian is incredibly disturbing to me.  Yet… on it goes.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

:facepalm:

”Patriotic Churches” always seem contradictory to me.  Christ wasn’t an American.  He didn’t (per our beliefs) come to save only the US and its citizens.  Yet… it seems like many Evangelical Christians think just that.

:facepalm:

(thank you for the link I plan to read)

It's always funny when you hear, albeit rarely, someone say that Jesus was an American. My guess is their Jesus also caries an Uzi with him wherever he goes. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

It's always funny when you hear, albeit rarely, someone say that Jesus was an American. My guess is their Jesus also caries an Uzi with him wherever he goes. 

Do they have “yes I’m ignorant” tattooed on their foreheads as well?

Edited March 28 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[kissdbyfire]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

It's always funny when you hear, albeit rarely, someone say that Jesus was an American. My guess is their Jesus also caries an Uzi with him wherever he goes. 

He’s also blond, blue-eyed, and a bigot. Because it’s not the Jesus of Christianity but rather an avatar of a huge section of diehard Trumpers, and this avatar is totes onboard w/ everything they believe and feel and “think”. 

[Zorral]

7 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

He’s also blond, blue-eyed, and a bigot. Because it’s not the Jesus of Christianity but rather an avatar of a huge section of diehard Trumpers, and this avatar is totes onboard w/ everything they believe and feel and “think”. 

Exactly.  The orange **** has made it legitimate for them to remake Jesus into their own image.  They don't want a compassionate, loving, welcoming Jesus.  They wanting a hating guntoting cruel violent superman, the kind of superman they want to be.  Why is this so difficult for people to get?  It's like the guy who says, "I love women," and abuses and rapes them.  We have no trouble believing these guys exist.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

One POTUS and three former are in town (though one of them was never ever a POTUS in which anyone with brains believed was in the last bit a legitimate representative of any bit of governing) -- and lordessa, can I hear it!  Not only has there been rain all day, and streets running with water, etc., now its rush hour and there are more than ever streets blocked off for 'security' itself. The sound of horns from out there is deafening.  People protest!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

13 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

He’s also blond, blue-eyed, and a bigot. Because it’s not the Jesus of Christianity but rather an avatar of a huge section of diehard Trumpers, and this avatar is totes onboard w/ everything they believe and feel and “think”. 

Well to answer Scot's question, you can identify these people because they both say they're devout Christians and think Jesus is too woke. Because that makes so much sense.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Well to answer Scot's question, you can identify these people because they both say they're devout Christians and think Jesus is too woke. Because that makes so much sense.  

The ones who do full body contortions to claim “what you do unto the least of these you do unto me” doesn’t mean what those whiney lefties want to claim it means?

[kissdbyfire]

9 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Well to answer Scot's question, you can identify these people because they both say they're devout Christians and think Jesus is too woke. Because that makes so much sense.  

Right. So they fixed Jesus! Not in the veterinary sense, but in the MAGA sense. 
Make Jesus great again!

[Kalbear]

Meanwhile, scotus delaying tactics work again, as SC district that was ruled gerrymandered too much will be used because it's too late to change.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-delay-prompts-federal-judges-act-south-carolina-redistri-rcna145267

[Zorral]

Trump’s Unbearable Temptation to Dump His Truth Social Stock
Would he really screw over MAGA investors to cover his gargantuan legal debts? Don’t bet against it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180205/trump-dump-truth-social-stock-unbearable-temptation

Quote

 

.... How worthless an investment is Truth Social? Looking at what killjoys call “the fundamentals,” the platform’s monthly active users fell 51 percent in February compared to the previous year, down to a very modest 494,000. Facebook, Twitter, and even Threads all have monthly active users in excess of 100 million. If Trump’s poll numbers followed the same trend as Truth Social traffic, Nikki Haley would today be the Republicans’ presumptive nominee.

DJT is what brokers call a “meme stock” and what the rest of us call a “sucker bet.” Meme stocks, of which GameStop is, in the words of The Street’s Martin Baccardax, “patient zero,” resemble internet memes in their volatility. When’s the last time you watched “Charlie bit me”? Probably not long before GameStop was last judged a plausible investment. To give you some sense of the culture behind the meme-stock phenomenon, meme-stock investors refer to themselves as “apes.” Apes can make money with meme stocks because, with the right mixture of tactical skill and dumb luck, you can make money with anything. But most apes end up like that poor bastard who gets his skull bashed in at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Securities and Exchange Commission would really prefer that you don’t invest in meme stocks.

It’s curious that Trump’s MAGA cult wants to invest in Truth Social but not to join Truth Social. After all, buying Truth Social will set you back 70 bucks a share. Joining Truth Social is free! MAGA Republicans number about 40 million, according to a January survey, and about one-third of these very unhinged extremists believe this country is on the brink of a violent civil war. Yet fewer than 2 percent will bestir themselves once a month to tap their computer keyboard to read the latest dispatch from MAGA Central. That gives me some hope that this same crowd will forget to go to the polls on November 5.

If there’s a political science term to describe a movement in which people are more willing to invest than participate, it certainly isn’t populism. Populist implies working-class, and the day traders who buy and sell meme stocks are seldom proletarians. This is a country where nearly half of all households own no stocks at all, where those that do typically possess them via retirement accounts managed by somebody else, and where the median value of stocks that are traded directly is a mere $15,000. No, the people buying Truth Social stock are either Apolitical Risk-Takers (APTs), hoping to ride the wave, or haut bourgeois True Believers (T.B.s). The T.B.s, I would guess, tend to be college-grad retirees, because about half of all MAGA types are retirees and not quite one-third hold college degrees.

Trump himself is part APT and part T.B. The big question for the Trump Media & Technology Group is which half of his brain will prevail. On the one hand, Trump wants to be president again, and Truth Social has the potential to become his Pravda, a very handy propaganda outlet under his complete control. On the other hand, Trump has this liquidity problem. Hence the temptation to Trump and dump.

As I’ve observed previously, Trump would rather swallow a fistful of crushed glass than use his own cash to put up, either directly or as collateral, the $175 million bond that’s due April 4 in his New York civil fraud case. My guess is that right now Trump’s leaning heavily on the insurance giant Chubb, which already bonded him for $91 million in the E. Jean Carroll judgment, to accept real estate as collateral for a $175 million bond. (Surety companies hate to accept real estate as collateral.) God only knows why Chubb would give Trump the time of day—its potential reasons are not flattering—but Chubb tried hard to put together an earlier deal to post the $454 million bond that an appeals court later reduced to $175 million. ....

 

 

[Zorral]

Wrong, posted too soon.  It takes well over 60 seconds to load threads in Firefox too.  What's going on?  Is the site under cyber attack or something?

[SpaceChampion]

4 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Wrong, posted too soon.  It takes well over 60 seconds to load threads in Firefox too.  What's going on?  Is the site under cyber attack or something?

Reddit was like that yesterday.

25 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Trump’s Unbearable Temptation to Dump His Truth Social Stock
Would he really screw over MAGA investors to cover his gargantuan legal debts? Don’t bet against it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180205/trump-dump-truth-social-stock-unbearable-temptation

 

Can i pet dat dawwwwg?

[SpaceChampion]

I got to wonder, that Trump bible must be heavily edited, right?  Got to leave out all the commandments and whatnot that Trump has violated.  Ladies and gentlemen:  The Two Commandments! 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

51 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Right. So they fixed Jesus! Not in the veterinary sense, but in the MAGA sense. 
Make Jesus great again!

Jesus thought Hitler had some good ideas. 

17 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Wrong, posted too soon.  It takes well over 60 seconds to load threads in Firefox too.  What's going on?  Is the site under cyber attack or something?

At this point it's probably best to post the problems we're having in the board issues thread up to. That will make it easier on Ran. 

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Meanwhile, scotus delaying tactics work again, as SC district that was ruled gerrymandered too much will be used because it's too late to change.

There was never much hope for Mace's district.  The racial differences were minimal compared to the Alabama and Louisiana cases.  Obviously the difference could still feasibly be decisive, but this comes as no surprise.  At least SCOTUS hasn't fucked over the former two.

[House Balstroko]

1 hour ago, SpaceChampion said:

I got to wonder, that Trump bible must be heavily edited, right?  Got to leave out all the commandments and whatnot that Trump has violated.  Ladies and gentlemen:  The Two Commandments! 

How about The Negative Commandments? Might not be any left of the original. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

10 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The complete contradiction of supporting Trump and being Christian is incredibly disturbing to me.  Yet… on it goes.

Anecdotally on another forum I have a few of those so called "Christians" who support Trump.I obviously couldn't resist pointing out the orange conman using the lord's name (and diary (?)) in vain is sorta the big no-no for any Christian (or rather should be), The dimmest of them (who is otherwise whining free styling about anti-white discrimination) commented on those Trump endorsed bibles as follows:

Quote

Donald Trump is now selling the God Bless the USA Bible.

It contains the King James Version translation, copies of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

All the things the liberals hate.

Make of that what you will. Personally I think those folks are beyond redemption.

Beyond redemption, talking about Florida... (nah not doing it, just needed to get someone's heartrate up).

Edited March 29 by A Horse Named Stranger

[DMC]

Heh, quite a coincidence.  This was just posted on Axios - Americans continue to lose their religion as GOP pushes it:

Quote

The survey found that 26% of Americans now consider themselves unaffiliated with a religion. That's up 5 percentage points from 2013, and reflects a widening gap between how citizens and lawmakers see religion's role in society. [...]

Just a slim majority of Americans (53%) now say that religion is important in their lives, down from 72% in 2013, the survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute says.