A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 43 of 725
One thing that I'm not and that you are is a real asshole, Second.
Why is a supposedly mega-rich guy like you coming to a forum with about 8 regular people left and continually taking personal jabs at them when your argument isn't going well?
Look at your replies to me here in the last 48 hours on this thread. You haven't actually said anything to me other than insults.
Face it. You're a bully. That's all you are.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In other news:
“Don’t forget, we’re still in two different wars that I started.” - George Bush
Actor Will Ferrell revived his portrayal of President George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live to deliver a reminder about the 43rd president, whose approval ratings have skyrocketed recently: Just because Trump is a bad president doesn’t mean Bush was a good one.
“I’m suddenly popular AF,” Ferrell, who hosted SNL on Saturday, said. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Man, I wish George W. Bush was still our president right about now. So I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight and remind you guys that I was really bad.”
Sixty-one percent of Americans now say they have a favorable view of Bush, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS released this week, including 54 percent of Democrats. When he left office in 2009, his favorability was at just 33 percent overall and 11 percent among Democrats. This is a perfect example of how easily Americans, including Democrats, forget precisely what went wrong in the past, which makes it impossible to avoid nearly the same mistakes in the present.
And I really do hope you're not throwing me in that box, Second.
Obama is still the worst, and I'm just as against GWB as I ever was. In fact, I blame the Obama administration squarely on the GWB administration. One would have never happened without the other one happening first.
I'm glad the article you quoted threw Democrats in there as well.
Anybody saying "Man, I wish GWB were president right now" are just as bad as anybody saying "Man, I wish Obama were president right now". It doesn't surprise me that even Democrats have a 54% favorability to GWB now.
It's a gross statistic. Gross as in filthy, as in I need to take a shower after reading it.
People, even Democrats, would say this today, knowing all of the very, very bad things that the GWB administration DID do... yet at this point in time there isn't any actual evidence of anything Trump has supposedly done other than being an asshole on Twitter.
And regarding learning from previous mistakes...
You don't have to go back 10 years to see how people forget the lessons. They're already forgetting the daily lessons that are being pounded into their heads as we speak.
Talk to me when the Left votes in a celebrity for President in 2020. It's worked out amazingly so far for Trump in 2016. It will work out even better with Oprah and The Rock in 2020!
[insert definition of insanity here]
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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I see you're trying to engage SECOND in an actual discussion, Jack. Let me know if you have any luck. Because as far as I can tell, SECOND is here to bitch, moan, troll, and feed his ego. Nothing more.
HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU BY NOW THAT IF YOU HAVE TO RESORT TO LOGICAL FALLACIES AND TROLLING YOUR SO-CALLED ARGUMENTS ARE LIES?
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Quote:As if you're being paid by the word, you guys are big on engaging in discussion, but your "discussions" never amount to anything useful or interesting. It always devolves, year after year and thread after thread, into your hurt feelings or your angry denouncements. Except in your imagination, this is not the right place for engaging in something so civilized as debate about the issues of the day. Firefly is the wrong TV show for what you want to do. Maybe you ought to try debating with fans of Star Trek Discovery? I hear it has more complexity and uncertainty about good and evil.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I see you're trying to engage SECOND in an actual discussion, Jack. Let me know if you have any luck. Because as far as I can tell, SECOND is here to bitch, moan, troll, and feed his ego. Nothing more.
Before reading the following story, the words “bad faith” need explanation. Some examples of bad faith include: a company representative who negotiates with union workers while secretly having no intent of compromising; a prosecutor who argues a legal position that he secretly knows to be false; an insurer who uses language and reasoning which are deliberately misleading in order to deny a claim. And now to the story:
Fascism Is Speaking In Bad Faith
http://miniver.blogspot.com/2017/12/fascism-is-speaking-in-bad-faith.h
tml
Labels: antifa, BS, Trumpism
It is important to understand that fascism is not a political ideology in the same way that communism is. Communists have a detailed policy program which they espouse and pursue. Fascists do not; their policy prescriptions are often outright incoherent.
Fascism is better understood as a political method. And a key part of that method is speaking in bad faith: falsely describing what they want and care about, as a way of disrupting the process of political discussion itself. The vigor with which fascists do this is difficult to understand unless one has encountered it.
I have talked about this before, when talking about Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Right, and free speech:
We should not defend that as free speech; we need to recognize it as an attack on free speech. .... This is a method and it has a purpose. If we look at the history of far right movements, we can recognize the basic pattern. These movements are not simply opposed to liberalism-as-in-the-Democratic-Party; they are opposed to liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy. They oppose universal human rights and equality. They aim to discredit liberalism by turning its systems against itself, making them impracticable, perverting the meaning of words like “free speech”.
In this we see a continuity between the fascists of the early 20th century and the fascists and para-fascists of today. Sartre's Reflections on the Jewish question describes this pattern in a troublingly familiar way.
Quote:This is not restricted to the specifics of anti-semitism. It is a general rhetorical style. Here is Harry Frankfurt, the author of the wonderful short book On Bullshit summing up the method.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Quote:
The distinction between lying and bullshitting is fairly clear. The liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false. He deliberately misrepresents what he takes to be the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is not constrained byNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Projecting:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
As if you're being paid by the word, you guys are big on engaging in discussion, but your "discussions" never amount to anything useful or interesting.
Followed by fifty thousand words that nobody bothered reading:
Quote:
It always devolves, year after year and thread after thread, into your hurt feelings or your angry denouncements. Except in your imagination, this is not the right place for engaging in something so civilized as debate about the issues of the day. Firefly is the wrong TV show for what you want to do. Maybe you ought to try debating with fans of Star Trek Discovery? I hear it has more complexity and uncertainty about good and evil.
Before reading the following story, the words “bad faith” need explanation. Some examples of bad faith include: a company representative who negotiates with union workers while secretly having no intent of compromising; a prosecutor who argues a legal position that he secretly knows to be false; an insurer who uses language and reasoning which are deliberately misleading in order to deny a claim. And now to the story:
Fascism Is Speaking In Bad Faith
http://miniver.blogspot.com/2017/12/fascism-is-speaking-in-bad-faith.h
tml
Labels: antifa, BS, Trumpism
It is important to understand that fascism is not a political ideology in the same way that communism is. Communists have a detailed policy program which they espouse and pursue. Fascists do not; their policy prescriptions are often outright incoherent.
Fascism is better understood as a political method. And a key part of that method is speaking in bad faith: falsely describing what they want and care about, as a way of disrupting the process of political discussion itself. The vigor with which fascists do this is difficult to understand unless one has encountered it.
I have talked about this before, when talking about Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Right, and free speech:
We should not defend that as free speech; we need to recognize it as an attack on free speech. .... This is a method and it has a purpose. If we look at the history of far right movements, we can recognize the basic pattern. These movements are not simply opposed to liberalism-as-in-the-Democratic-Party; they are opposed to liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy. They oppose universal human rights and equality. They aim to discredit liberalism by turning its systems against itself, making them impracticable, perverting the meaning of words like “free speech”.
In this we see a continuity between the fascists of the early 20th century and the fascists and para-fascists of today. Sartre's Reflections on the Jewish question describes this pattern in a troublingly familiar way.Quote:This is not restricted to the specifics of anti-semitism. It is a general rhetorical style. Here is Harry Frankfurt, the author of the wonderful short book On Bullshit summing up the method.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.Quote:
The distinction between lying and bullshitting is fairly clear. The liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false. He deliberately misrepresents what he takes to be the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. In making his assertion, he is indifferent to whether what he isNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump’s General Just Announced a New Cold War.
https://ourfuture.org/20180126/trumps-general-just-announced-the-new-c
old-war-who-will-stop-it
Defense Secretary James Mattis announced a dramatic shift in military policy last week.
Mattis made his announcement in a speech to the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins. Mattis began the speech by paying tribute to what his prepared remarks called the “character” of Paul Nitze, a noted Cold War hawk. Together with fellow cold warriors Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz, Nitze created “Team B,” a private Cold War think tank whose sole purpose was to overrule the CIA’s more modest estimates of the Soviet military threat.
Nitze’s “background,” according to Mattis’ text, made the SAIS “a fitting place” to unveil the administration’s new national defense strategy. That’s true, although perhaps not for the reasons Mattis may think.
Team B’s estimates were “grossly inaccurate,” as former Reagan defense official Lawrence Korb noted in a 2004 Los Angeles Times op-ed; even the CIA’s more modest estimates of Soviet power turned out to be overstated. Nevertheless, its findings were “widely leaked to the press” shortly before Jimmy Carter became president.
Team B’s backers got the military spending they wanted, with a buildup that began under Carter and accelerated under Ronald Reagan. Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives eventually used equally spurious data to drum up support for the invasion of Iraq.
As president-elect, Donald Trump promised an end to “intervention and chaos” and insisted that “our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying ISIS.” But with Defense Secretary James Mattis’ speech, Trump’s administration has fallen even more in line with the bipartisan consensus of the last eighty years.
The New Cold War
In the SAIS speech, Mattis declared that “Great Power competition between nations (is) becoming a reality once again.” He continued: “Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”
Nitze named China and Russia as the primary threat, describing them as “nations that … seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models, pursuing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions.”
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Trump’s law: attention creates value
The insight that has separated him from his competitors is that he has cared less about the nature of the coverage he received than that he received coverage at all.
“Even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business,” Trump said in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. He goes on to recall the lesson he learned being attacked for a particularly gaudy skyscraper he sought to build. “The point,” he says, “is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.”
This is the law by which Trump lives his life. Attention creates value, at least for him. Before Trump, every politician hewed to the same basic rule: You want as much positive coverage, and as little negative coverage, as possible. Trump upended that.
His rule, his realization, is that you want as much coverage as possible, full stop. The point is that it’s coverage — that you’re the story, that you’re squeezing out your competitors, that you’re on people’s minds.
This was Trump’s true political innovation: He realized that presidential campaigns — and particularly presidential primaries — had become reality shows, and the path to victory was to get the most attention, even if much of that attention was negative.
There is an old line about the media: We don’t cover the planes that land safely. Most politicians try to get media coverage while landing the plane safely. They stage photo ops at factories, give prepared statements, deliver carefully crafted speeches. The result is dull, predictable, normal — and ignored.
Trump dominates news cycle after news cycle by crashing planes into Twitter.
The media is laser-focused on Trump’s words, behavior, decisions, grievances. America ends up having the fights Trump wants us to have.
Trump understands this power. He knows he can wrest the news cycle back at a moment’s notice.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/29/16900646/trump-administratio
n-tweets-media-polarization
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Trump’s State of the Union Address
The President tries to revive his low approval ratings by delivering the greatest State of the Union speech in history and to strengthen his relationship with First Lady Melania by naming her the national bird.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump’s State of the Union
www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/opinion/what-the-economic-data-dont-tell-us
.html
It’s a sure thing that Donald Trump will spend much of his State of the Union boasting about the economy. So this seems like a good time for a refresher on some basic macroeconomics – and the reasons why the expansion of 2017, which continued the long expansion that began in 2010, is in no sense a justification for wildly optimistic growth projections looking forward.
As a reminder, the Trump Treasury department claims that tax cuts will pay for themselves because the economy will grow at almost 3 percent a year for the next decade. This growth projection didn’t come from any model; it was just pulled out of … well, you fill in the rest. But every time there’s a good quarter of growth, the usual suspects take time off from talking about deep state conspiracies to claim that the 3% forecast is coming true. Why is this nonsense?
First, you need to know that quarter-to-quarter and even year-to-year growth rates are very variable. The economy grew at a 5 percent annual rate during much of the Carter administration (how many people know that?); it grew around 4 percent during the second Clinton administration. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=hRWd
What’s behind these growth fluctuations? The business cycle. Potential output – the economy’s productive capacity – grows fairly smoothly. But recessions leave some of that capacity idle, and the economy can temporarily grow fast as idle capacity is put back to use. The unemployment rate is an imperfect measure of idle capacity; still, there’s a strong relationship – Okun’s Law – between changes in the unemployment rate – capacity going into or out of use – and short-run economic growth.
The thing is, however, that we’re currently close to full employment. The unemployment rate is historically low. Other indicators, like the rate at which workers are quitting jobs (a sign of how confident they are of finding new jobs) also point to a more or less full employment economy. Wage growth and inflation are still subdued, but it’s still unlikely that unemployment can fall a lot from here. This means that growth over the next decade will have to come from rising capacity, meaning growth in potential output.
So is there any sign that potential output growth is anywhere near 3 percent, or in fact that it has accelerated? No. Here’s Okun’s Law for the past decade: www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/opinion/what-the-economic-data-dont-tell-us
.html
The relationship isn’t perfect, because this is economics, but it’s pretty strong. It suggests a potential growth rate – growth consistent with constant unemployment – of maybe 1.5 percent. And 2017 isn’t an outlier. (It took a minute looking at the data for the last 11 years, but then it was obvious that predicted growth would be 1.5% if the unemployment rate was neither increasing nor decreasing.)
Why is potential growth so low? Unfavorable demographics are one big culprit: the baby-boomers are getting old (you kids get off my lawn), so the working-age population is barely growing. Oh, and cracking down on immigration is, you know, not likely to help on that front.
Productivity growth is also lackluster, despite all the hype about robots and all that.
So if you think about it, 2017 offers no evidence to support big talk about future growth. On the contrary, the fact that unemployment declined despite not-so-fast growth is a sign that growth will be a lot slower going forward, now that we don’t have a lot of unemployed Americans to put back to work.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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hmmmmm... no mention of quantitative easing in there. Surely that has something to do with it, even though I'm sure Trump won't mention it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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