Real World Event Discussions
A thread for Democrats Only
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Monday, June 8, 2020 9:21 AM
Quote:What will you do to yourself if Trump loses? His chance of winning is only 42% tonight. If he wins I'll be celebrating the additional material wealth he will be sending my way. Too bad there will be nothing tangible for you, but there is the emotional payoff. I be happy with the money.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://odds.watch/trump-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Monday, June 8, 2020 10:17 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What will you do to yourself if Trump loses? His chance of winning is only 42% tonight. If he wins I'll be celebrating the additional material wealth he will be sending my way. Too bad there will be nothing tangible for you, but there is the emotional payoff. I be happy with the money.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://odds.watch/trump-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I don't know. I know what I won't do.
I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.
And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Monday, June 8, 2020 5:53 PM
Quote:6ix, you have called me a liar about a thousand times, you know. In all these years I never thought of Trump as the actual problem with America. Back in the 70's it wasn't Nixon who was the problem for America. It was people like you, more than a hundred million, who have always been the main problem, for themselves and America. Calling me a liar a thousand times is just one of the ways your thinking is highly defective, which makes you a problem for the country. There is a nice article about how countries and a large fraction of their citizens get themselves into deep trouble for psychological, not ideological, reasons:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't know. I know what I won't do.
I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.
And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Why Have Republican Leaders Abandoned Their Principles In Support Of An Immoral And Dangerous President?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/6122
50/
Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.
Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality: Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Trump induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs and compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—encouraging him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.
Trump’s lie about the crowd size was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. The point was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.
These kinds of lies have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.
The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email accou
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Monday, June 8, 2020 6:58 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you have called me a liar about a thousand times, you know. In all these years I never thought of Trump as the actual problem with America. Back in the 70's it wasn't Nixon who was the problem for America. It was people like you, more than a hundred million, who have always been the main problem, for themselves and America. Calling me a liar a thousand times is just one of the ways your thinking is highly defective, which makes you a problem for the country. There is a nice article about how countries and a large fraction of their citizens get themselves into deep trouble for psychological, not ideological, reasons:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't know. I know what I won't do.
I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.
And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Starts out the post with lies and insults, then thinks I'm going to read the next 40 paragraphs.
lol
You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Monday, June 8, 2020 7:30 PM
Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner discusses the May jobs report and says the biggest reason for the positive news centers around the massive stimulus implemented by Washington.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:21 PM
Quote:I Watched the Arab Spring Unfold in Egypt. The Parallels to America Now Are Disturbing.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Starts out the post with lies and insults, then thinks I'm going to read the next 40 paragraphs.
lol
You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There are similarities. “Trump called the protesters in D.C. the other day terrorists,” Fahmy said, referring to a letter from the president’s former lawyer that Donald Trump tweeted. “I was shocked when I saw it this morning. That’s exactly what happened in Egypt. That’s exactly the narrative that happened under authoritarian regimes, right? They’re against the security of the state, so they’re terrorists.” In Egypt, the regime’s supporters soon grew more comfortable with state violence against the protesters.
If you were on the ground during the Arab Spring, it’s hard not to see disturbing parallels to the protests in America now.
The first time I inhaled tear gas was in 2012. I was in Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, where just one year earlier, half a million Egyptian protesters declared victory over the military dictator Hosni Mubarak, who formally resigned as president after 30 years of rule. After the elections that followed, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won and promptly attempted to grant himself broad autocratic powers, which drew large crowds and journalists like me right back to the square.
The tear gas canisters I breathed that day bared bold block letters: “Made in the USA.”
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/police-brutality-protests-
arab-spring-tear-gas.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:32 PM
Quote:One attitude Republicans are displaying is labeled "LOL nothing matters". Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate with Trump, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?
This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200605165317/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 5:39 PM
Quote:House Democrats have passed the HEROES Act, a very good bill extending and improving economic relief. But Friday’s employment report encourages Republicans to revert to type; they’ll almost surely block any significant further relief until or unless the economic situation becomes even more dire than it is.
Originally posted by THG:
Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner discusses the May jobs report and says the biggest reason for the positive news centers around the massive stimulus implemented by Washington.
It also encourages them to push for more opening, more relaxation of social distancing, despite the fact that Covid-19 is nowhere near under control and there are early indications that the pandemic may be roaring back to life as states reopen.
So it’s all too possible that we’ll see an ugly scene in the late summer and early fall — more state and local government layoffs and widespread job losses in industries that have so far been relatively unscathed as desperate workers slash spending, all against the backdrop of a resurgence in hospitalizations and deaths. And the May uptick in jobs makes that scene more likely, because it promotes more wishful thinking from the people who insisted a few months ago that Covid-19 would go away and posed no threat to the economy.
Maybe we’ll be lucky and the bad things I’m worried about won’t actually materialize. But hoping for the best isn’t a plan.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opinion/coronavirus-jobs-report.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:01 PM
Maybe I didn't LOL hard enough.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:29 PM
Quote:Will you laugh out loud when voting for The Chaos President?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Maybe I didn't LOL hard enough.
Do Wrong, Be Wrong. :(
At a Republican presidential debate in December 2015, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made this prediction about then front-runner Donald Trump: "He's a chaos candidate. And he'd be a chaos president."
That quote proved deeply prescient. Trump as president has seemed to welcome chaos, using his Twitter feed to lash out in 100 directions at once -- throwing chum in the water to see who responds and how.
Following even a single day of Trump tweets, comments and pronouncements is exhausting. It's hard to know where to look. Or what to read. Or watch. There's just so much -- a flurry of activity, with everything moving so quickly that it's hard to center any one thing in your line of vision.
Which, for the most part, is how Trump wants it. He believes that he thrives in this chaos, that he is able to navigate it in ways others can't.
That chaos theory has taken a turn in recent weeks, however. The combined effect of the (still) ongoing coronavirus pandemic with the protests across the country has created a level of uncertainty that has people turning to the President for a stable response. And Trump's chaos characteristics are an insufficient balm for those worries.
An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday morning showed that 8 in 10 Americans believe that the country is out of control. Just 15% say it is under control.
That is bad news for Trump. No one likes to feel as though their world is rapidly spiraling out of control. And they like it even less when it feels as though their top elected leader is making that chaos worse rather than better.
It's no accident, then, that -- per above -- Trump's numbers are slipping in the swing states where he needs to win.
And here's the problem for a chaos president: When people want stability and calm, you have no idea how to provide it to them.
www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/politics/us-election-2020-week-ahead/index.html
Here is a typical Trump out-of-his-mind tweet from today:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN
I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
7:34 AM · Jun 9, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270333484528214018
I laughed out loud at how crazy Trump can reveal himself to be with only one tweet. Two hours later, I was wondering if anyone beside me noticed that tweet. Someone did:
Quote:www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/9/21285086/trump-conspiracy-the
Martin Gugino is still in critical condition as the president tweets wildly unfounded claims about the man’s run-in with police.
President Donald Trump spread an unfounded conspiracy theory Tuesday, suggesting that a 75-year-old man who is in critical condition after he was shoved to the ground at a protest by Buffalo, New York, police on June 4 is actually an “antifa provocateur.”
The president was referring to a viral video of an incident showing police knocking over 75-year-old Martin Gugino while attempting to control protests against police violence in the western New York city. After being pushed by an officer, Gugino fell, appearing to hit his head on a sidewalk, and was ignored by dozens of officers as he bled from his ear, motionless.
ory-buffalo-antifa-provocateur
When you read the details of this incident, it is clear Trump can't think straight. How does he do his job, which is much more subtle, nuanced, and complicated than this one police beating? Almost certainly he can't do most parts of being President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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