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Re: US Politics Thread

johndivney wrote:
Randall Flagg wrote:

So your evidence is the judge.  The judge who is a member of La Raza (That's 'the Race' in Spanish for those playing at home) which advocates for Mexican dominion over the South West.  They advocate for amnesty/citizenship for people who illegally enter our country.  So yes, it was perfectly reasonable for Trump to call in to question the judgement of a Judge who in his off time, advocates for Mexican ownership of US territories and citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Why is this not part of your discussion? 

You're correctly condemning a group of white racists who are arguing for "their race" and to keep ownership of America in their hands.  Why don't you make that connection to La Raza and condemn them?  Should a judge who is a member of this latest Neo Nazi group be allowed to preside on a trial of an a white assaulter against a minority? 

I'm truly trying to understand the basis of your argument, but all I can gather from your posts are someone who isn't informed on the issue or consciously chooses to ignore it.  Either way, it's not compelling.


I don't even know what our argument even is tbh. I was responding to James & SG over the media's role when you rode in ranting about transsexuals (again) & dictionaries.
You define terms of an argument that are impossible to argue against. The truth of the interpretation will land in your bubble.

It's plain to see that the empty justifications and defences proffered for the lies and gutter behaviour of your president elect is a dangerous distraction and denial of the man's character, or indeed, lackthereof.

His intimidatory, bullying example, lies and manipulation are what is relevant & what is being reflected. But if a lot of you are not going to accept or acknowledge his actions, to continue to indulge him then the writing is on the wall. You don't appease bully's or give them more authority or the damage they are already doing will just increase.

Swings and roundabouts of course. In 4-8years it could be a different name but the same argument. Or, the anger a lot felt in this election could be channelled into something or someone of decent morale fibre, progressive & unifying. Someone who reflects something aspirational & inspirational.
Imagine that.. maybe that doesn't exist & that's part of the reason you have Trump. Or maybe it does exist & that's part of the reason you have Trump. Whatever, like I say the character of the man is plain to see & is being reflected back, & to excuse or justify him as somehow correct isn't going to turn out well. It's already happening.

Re: US Politics Thread

johndivney wrote:
PaSnow wrote:

Maybe its time to look at how each state has been allocated, as our demographics are changing.

This. This is something I didn't grasp as to how & why some states are seemingly allocated more votes & whether or when they've been revised ever.

misterID wrote:
Randall Flagg wrote:
mitchejw wrote:

Hillarys lead in the popular vote now well over 2 million....

Thank god we're a republic and have the electoral colledictate r 3 states shouldn't dictate how the rest of the country lives.

Actually 2 or 3 states do dictate how the rest of our country lives.

This is what I thought had basically happened.. so much so I thought Randall's comment was somewhat tongue in cheek..??

TheMole
 Rep: 77 

Re: US Politics Thread

TheMole wrote:
Randall Flagg wrote:
TheMole wrote:

An article obviously copied from some left wing site.

Worse, actually... I copied it off of reddit smile

Randall Flagg wrote:

I read every single one of these. Did you?

Yup, sure did...

Randall Flagg wrote:

If the worst you can tie to trump is that in 50 years of real estate, he didn't want to rent to people on welfare (is it cause they were black or because poor people destroy their properties. I'd love for SLC  to try to avoid this claim. He's our resident real estate expert), that's pretty fucking good.  Someone in the DoJ accused him of discrimination. No evidence or conviction was ever put forward. 40 years from now I'll bet you'll claim the Ferguson riots were due to racism too. After all, Holder's DoJ accused them of racism.  No evidence or case they can point to, just a feeling and you swallow it.

He signed and agreed to a consent decree, which amongst other requirements stipulated that Trump had to publish ads in prominent papers and magazines how their apartments were also available to blacks, hispanics and other minorities. The decree was seen by everyone as a major victory for the government and the fair housing act at the time. At the time only Trump considered it a victory for himself, claiming that since the decree did not include an admission of guilt, he came of scot-free. So your analogy is completely flawed: it is only now that people have started arguing that his actions were not racist, not the other way around.
But more than his actions in the 70's, consider the plethora of other reports, such as the one about how one of his casinos was find $200k for keeping black employees of the floor when a high roller asked for it. I'm sure you can go and shed doubt on each and every single one of these stories, but consider how many there are. Even if you wouldn't be able to 100% substantiate all of them, is it not clear that there's a pattern here?

polluxlm
 Rep: 221 

Re: US Politics Thread

polluxlm wrote:

Hateful 'Trump' Notes Allegedly Aimed at Student Were Fabricated, University Says

Hateful notes and emails allegedly sent to a North Park University student were “fabricated,” the school’s president said Tuesday in a statement, and the woman who claimed they were aimed toward her is no longer enrolled at the school.

“We are confident there is no further threat of repeated intolerance to any member of our campus community stemming from this recent incident,” the university’s President David Parkyn said in a statement.

The student, Taylor Volk, said on Nov. 14 she had received emails and notes taped to her door containing harassing, threatening language and mentions of President-elect Donald Trump. She had also posted pictures of notes with homophobic slurs to her Facebook account.

Volk and school officials did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Volk said at the time she was confident North Park was investigating the matter, although the school would not comment directly on the notes to NBC 5. The university’s marketing director, Chris Childers, said in a phone interview earlier this month “any incident that is reported to North Park is taken extremely seriously.”

A Chicago Police official said on Nov. 14 they could not find any report about the incident.

“When student safety is compromised, and when institutional values are not maintained, we will respond with resolve as we did in the most recent incident,” Parkyn said. “Additionally, we ask members of the community to reflect our institutional ethos and commitment in our interpersonal relationships—through inclusion, civility, dialogue, respect, hospitality, and a mutual love for God and all people.”

North Park's campus is located in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, noted for its diversity as an immigrant gateway community, on the city's Northwest Side.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/no … 56366.html

Further threat? There was no threat to begin with!

polluxlm
 Rep: 221 

Re: US Politics Thread

polluxlm wrote:

A Lesson In Cognitive Dissonance

Imagine you are one of the anti-Trump folks who believe we just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator. Let’s say that’s the movie playing in your mind. That’s some scary stuff.

Now imagine watching the news as Trump reveals in slow-motion that he’s flexible and pragmatic on just about everything. Thomas Friedman at the New York Times just reported that Trump is – as of yesterday anyway – open-minded about climate-change science, and Trump is no longer in favor of waterboarding terror suspects.

You also watched Trump move to the middle on his immigration policies. And you watched as Trump said he plans to keep the good parts of Obamacare instead of jettisoning it whole.

And you saw Trump say he wasn’t interested in prosecuting Clinton. Her supporters were worried that Trump was going to go full-dictator and jail his adversaries. That won’t happen, apparently.

And Trump also told the New York Times that they don’t need to worry about changes in libel laws. That means it will not become easier for people such as Trump to sue them out of business. That was one of the possibilities that scared people.

The areas in which Trump hasn’t budged in his opinion seem to be where states’ rights are involved. Trump would leave it to the courts and to the states to decide on abortion, legal marijuana, and gay marriage. You might not like the fact that Trump wants the federal government to stay out of those decisions, but it isn’t very dictator-like to leave big decisions to the states.

As Trump continues to demonstrate that he was never the incompetent monster his critics believed him to be, the critics will face an identity crisis. They either have to accept that they understand almost nothing about how the world works – because they got everything wrong about Trump – or they need to double-down on their current hallucination. Most of his critics will double-down. That’s how normal brains work.

And that brings us to our current situation. As Trump continues to defy all predictions from his critics, the critics need to maintain their self-images as the smart ones who saw this new Hitler coming. And that means you will see hallucinations like you have never seen. It will be epic.

The reason this will be so fun to watch is that we rarely get to see a situation in which the facts so vigorously violate a hallucination. Before Trump won the presidency everyone was free to imagine the future they expected. But as Trump continues to do one reasonable thing after another, his critics have a tough choice. They can either…

1. Reinterpret their self-images from wise to clueless.

or…

2. Generate an even stronger hallucination. (Cognitive dissonance.)

If Trump’s critics take the second option – and most of them will – it means you will see a lot of pretzel-logic of the type that is necessary hold onto the illusion that Trump is still a monster despite continuing evidence to the contrary.

Prediction: Expect the anti-Trump press to continue asking Trump surrogates this question: “Why do you think the KKK and white nationalists support Trump?”

The question makes sense if you don’t think about it for too long. But once you realize that Trump has repeatedly and publicly disavowed those groups, you have to hallucinate extra-hard to make the racist narrative work. That’s where the “top-secret-racist-dog-whistle” comes in. You need a theory to explain why the supposed Racist-in-Chief keeps disavowing racists. How does that make any sense?

This is where cognitive dissonance comes in. In order to explain Trump’s disavowal of White Nationalists and the KKK while holding onto the hallucination that Trump is a dangerous monster, you have to hallucinate that he is playing a clever game of pretending to be against racists while secretly planning to purge the earth of all non-orange people.

That feels unlikely to me. I think Trump just wants to do a good job for the country, thereby bringing money and glory to his family name. And he won’t get any of that by being a racist monster. He only gets that happy ending by being pragmatic and flexible, exactly as we observe him now to be.

I think the total number of KKK members is a few thousand people sprinkled across the country. But what matters more than the absolute number is the trend. The group once numbered over a million. Now they are a few thousand. Did Trump’s election cause a spike in recruitment that will have a lasting impact on the long term trend toward zero membership? I doubt it. But in any case, you have to wonder why the press isn’t reporting KKK membership trends. Every other part of the story is meaningless without that one piece of data.

Anyway, enjoy the show. And enjoy Thanksgiving too.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1535591050 … dissonance

Re: US Politics Thread

johndivney wrote:

Imagine you are one of the Trump folks who believe you just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator. Let’s say that’s the movie playing in your mind. That’s some stuff you can get on board with.
Now imagine watching the news as Trump reveals in slow-motion that he’s flexible and pragmatic on just about everything. Thomas Friedman at the New York Times just reported that Trump is – as of yesterday anyway – open-minded about climate-change science, and Trump is no longer in favor of waterboarding terror suspects.

You'd maybe be a little pissed off the guy lied to you, deceived and manipulated you. Unless you're just content to be on the winning team of course.

But that's the game, eh? The better team won. They fought the election on their terms by and large and won key battles. For all the debased behaviour and bad example set, at the end of the day they won on those terms. I dunno, that sort of thing it doesn't appeal to me but obviously I'm on the wrong side/or would be. I ws on the wrong side of Brexit too..

Edit: I should prob redefine what I mean by "wrong side" there, I mean "losing side"..

polluxlm
 Rep: 221 

Re: US Politics Thread

polluxlm wrote:

Imagine you are one of the Trump folks who believe you just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator.

That's the thing, we don't believe any of that.

Re: US Politics Thread

AtariLegend wrote:
polluxlm wrote:

Imagine you are one of the Trump folks who believe you just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator.

That's the thing, we don't believe any of that.

That's the thing.

Smoking Guns
 Rep: 330 

Re: US Politics Thread

Smoking Guns wrote:

Happy Thanksgiving!

slcpunk
 Rep: 149 

Re: US Politics Thread

slcpunk wrote:
AtariLegend wrote:
polluxlm wrote:

Imagine you are one of the Trump folks who believe you just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator.

That's the thing, we don't believe any of that.

That's the thing.


It really is.

Trump thinks global warming is a hoax. His words. I tend to believe them.

Trump has numerous audio tapes of him talking about women like a pig. His words. I tend to believe them.

Trump spent years espousing racist rhetoric in regards to Obama's birth certificate. His words. I tend to believe them.

Trump supporters see/hear all this, and conclude he's not any of these things.

That's the thing.

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