The reply name contains a link to the comment, which fulfills the same function without duplicating text :up: — darthbarracuda

But a direct quote really gives substance and respect to the source material, for example, like this:

Like, it's been four years. If people continue to be surprised that Trump is a total wanker, who, really, is the idiot?

People act like - if only one can accumulate enough evidence that Trump is an idiot, people are bound to change their minds any second. Everytime Trump says or tweets or looks or does something stupid, liberals mobilize en masse to say: 'look, we finally got him! Don't you see it?'. And when no one gives a flying fuck because no one except liberals are playing that insular, suffocating game, they bunker down and wait for the next act of outrage before crawling out of their holes again to add yet one more piece of evidence to their list that no one but them gives a shit about.

And then, to top it off, they get incredulous like - why can't the hoi polloi see what we see? They must be dumb. We must be too smart for them! Didn't you see his Tweet??!?!? Wasn't it TeRrIbLE?? Like holy shit these people are the dumbest peices of shit on the planet and they think the situation is exactly the opposite. — StreetlightX

See?

The reply name contains a link to the comment, which fulfills the same function without duplicating text :up: — darthbarracuda


But a direct quote really gives substance and respect to the source material, for example, like this:

Like, it's been four years. If people continue to be surprised that Trump is a total wanker, who, really, is the idiot?

People act like - if only one can accumulate enough evidence that Trump is an idiot, people are bound to change their minds any second. Everytime Trump says or tweets or looks or does something stupid, liberals mobilize en masse to say: 'look, we finally got him! Don't you see it?'. And when no one gives a flying fuck because no one except liberals are playing that insular, suffocating game, they bunker down and wait for the next act of outrage before crawling out of their holes again to add yet one more piece of evidence to their list that no one but them gives a shit about.

And then, to top it off, they get incredulous like - why can't the hoi polloi see what we see? They must be dumb. We must be too smart for them! Didn't you see his Tweet??!?!? Wasn't it TeRrIbLE?? Like holy shit these people are the dumbest peices of shit on the planet and they think the situation is exactly the opposite. — StreetlightX


See? — Merkwurdichliebe

Oh yeah I see now.

The reply name contains a link to the comment, which fulfills the same function without duplicating text :up: — darthbarracuda


But a direct quote really gives substance and respect to the source material, for example, like this:

Like, it's been four years. If people continue to be surprised that Trump is a total wanker, who, really, is the idiot?

People act like - if only one can accumulate enough evidence that Trump is an idiot, people are bound to change their minds any second. Everytime Trump says or tweets or looks or does something stupid, liberals mobilize en masse to say: 'look, we finally got him! Don't you see it?'. And when no one gives a flying fuck because no one except liberals are playing that insular, suffocating game, they bunker down and wait for the next act of outrage before crawling out of their holes again to add yet one more piece of evidence to their list that no one but them gives a shit about.

And then, to top it off, they get incredulous like - why can't the hoi polloi see what we see? They must be dumb. We must be too smart for them! Didn't you see his Tweet??!?!? Wasn't it TeRrIbLE?? Like holy shit these people are the dumbest peices of shit on the planet and they think the situation is exactly the opposite. — StreetlightX


See?
— Merkwurdichliebe

Oh yeah I see now. — darthbarracuda

Love it! :rofl:

[Alternative title: How most react to Trump]

ONCE, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

-W.B. Yeats

-----

Trump is simply a very, very toxic person. Most people, if they experience some local version of his kind of toxicity at all, recoil without really knowing or understanding what happened to them. People with any extended contact often suffer aftereffects, something like a kind of PTSD. But his kind hurts everyone. Trump himself is simply the pathology concentrated.

And Streetlight's got the sense of another reaction, but even he is caught in it as a kind of reaction formation.

People act like - if only one can accumulate enough evidence that Trump is an idiot, people are bound to change their minds any second. Everytime Trump says or tweets or looks or does something stupid, liberals mobilize en masse to say: 'look, we finally got him! Don't you see it?' — StreetlightX

Trump is toxic waste - trash. In January, at least, he will be finally subject to justice. And it will be their business to take out the trash. Although we can learn from the experience of him, he himself has nothing to teach, and apart from the hazard of him, is without any value at all. Jacinda Ardern's refusal to name the NZ shooter should be our guide. Once Trump and his family and the criminals around them are collared and placed where people can assured that appropriate punishment will be meted out to them, the rest of us should simply stop wasting time and energy on him and them. Their existence is a kind of train-wreck, and we have to clean up the mess, get better get well, and move on. He is certainly no Juan, not a man of any thigh at all. And ultimately not even worth the anger he has generated. I do wish, though, that any of the tradespeople he cheated years ago had taken a baseball-bat to his knees; that, and the world is a better place.

I wonder if the 2016 Bernie supporters who voted for Trump are truly happily with what they got. — Relativist

I cannot see how anyone who truly agreed with Bernie would. Most stayed home, I'm afraid, as did so many others who just assumed based upon all the political narratives at the time that Trump could not possibly win.

Quite a few warned otherwise, and a couple - at least - saw the increasing likelihood of a totalitarian style(anti-establishment) leader being elected years before it actually happened. That's the result of a vast majority of Americans sharing a deep-seated distrust of American government that has been confirmed and reconfirmed with each successive administration since Nixon. While at the same time, the opportunities for Americans born into less fortunate socioeconomic circumstances to earn, create, and/or otherwise legally acquire enough wealth to live comfortable lives have tremendously diminished.

The ground was fertilized by decades of elected officials misrepresentation of Americans; of not acting in the best interest of the overwhelming majority of Americans when faced with the choice between what's best for the overwhelming majority, and what's best for the few.

Bernie began to educate the American people about all this, and he was silenced for the most part by the very establishments that Americans wanted to hold accountable for the unacceptable results of fifty years worth of progressively increasing despicable governance. Regular average everyday working Americans began to acquire knowledge of why things had turned so much for the worse.

That much became very obvious in both 2016 and 2020. Add to that all of the disinformation, lies, and propaganda that had Bernie supporters in it's sights(particularly in 2016), and all these seemingly disparate circumstances(and there are plenty more aside from these) certainly had an overall effect on the election by virtue of having an overall effect on the turnout.

The circumstances are now remarkably different.

The sad irony, of course, is that the swiftest and most reliable method for containing the pandemic required resources and actions that the United States government simply would not spend or take though it could have, should have, and ought still be spent and taken.

We are more than seven months into this, and are still not prepared to do what it takes to contain the virus while causing the least amount of possible harm to - mainly - the less fortunate Americans.

Nationwide stay at home orders, with as few exceptions as possible, while providing everyone who would be otherwise earning an income with an amount equivalent to their earned income for a period of time adequate to contain the virus. Widespread testing, isolation/quarantine, and contact tracing until the community spread has reached manageable levels.

We are still grossly unprepared for doing so. The president knows this, and thus is doing everything he can possibly think of to convince people to believe that the pandemic is nothing to worry about. That way, there is no focus upon the fact that the government is still not prepared to contain this pandemic. That is the first step to getting back to normal(life beyond the pandemic).

I'm not at all confident that what can be done, and ought be done, will be done, even if Biden wins in a landslide. I see no reason to believe that had such strict measures been taken, we would have already been long since past the negative effects/affects of this pandemic. I suspect that that is still quite true. Such actions taken now would result in containing the pandemic with the least amount of harm, much faster than the current method of approach.

It's the sexual abuse and unabashed racism that really turns me off Trump. The fact that he's a babbling retard doesn't really distinguish him from recent Republican presidents.

(OK, so they were polite babbling retards).

Trump has certainly not been establishment. Was that a good thing? — Relativist

For alot of people, yeah it was. Trump was able to fool undecided voters with his outsider status and make them take a gamble on him. Although Hillary led Trump in alot of the polls, she only ever won 45% of the vote, which meant that if Trump won a majority of the remaining voters while Clinton stayed stagnant, he'd beat her.

This canard again. So there's no substantive political difference between Biden and Trump? No operative ideological difference between 'Neoliberalism' and 'Neofascism', huh? This live-in outhouse is on fire, and all we have is a bucket of piss with which to douse the blaze, so we ought stop yelling "Fire! Fire!" and just let it burn down? Your faraway disgust at The American Collapse (aka "Carnage") blinds you, SLX, to the not-quite-yet futile choice to be made between a corporatist P-o-S and a runaway Plague-denier? I bet the schadenfreude from the cheap seats out in the hinterland just tickles your sack. One more time, comrade: THIS ELECTION IS A REFERENDUM ON THE INCUMBENT. FULL STOP. :mask:

Biden-Harris 2020 :victory:

I didn't say that "there's no substantive political difference between Biden and Trump" so one has to wonder who exactly you're replying to.

I didn't claim you said that. Try answering any or all of my four questions.

My takeaway from the exchange in this thread is that the left really cannot help but fracture itself with ideological arguments.

My takeaway from the exchange in this thread is that the left really cannot help but fracture itself with ideological arguments. — Echarmion

Almost as if "the left" isn't a single ideology.

Almost as if "the left" isn't a single ideology. — Michael

Neither is the right, but they seem to do a better job of putting aside differences to access the power of unity.

Voting for Biden is such an obvious decision, it's something the Left (or what I call the Left, the activists who are in tune with the reality of the ground) should talk about for 10 minutes and then shut the hell up and spend the rest of the year on other politics (unless you live in a swing state and want to increase turn out or something). For people who rhetorically stress about the limits of the electoral politics for real change, they spend huge amounts of energy bitching about it more than anyone else. It's so simple and quick, it can barely even be called a strategic decision. It's one of those small steps along the way to the actual strategic questions, like a small turf battle you need to win in a long war (but that you still need to win if you want to proceed). If you're so emotionally stuck on this obvious and simple fork in the road, you're probably not thinking about the other 1000 steps. Or more like you're probably not prepared for it because there are all kinds of far more complicated and harder decisions to be made on that path, the rest of the army will just have to leave you behind.

I literally do not give a shit about Trump retweeting whatever trash he happens upon while internetting. You couldn't pay me to give less fucks. If you continue to be surprised and outraged by such behaviour, you deserve a shithead like Trump. — StreetlightX

I'm explaining my point of view, not criticizing yours. But I am sad that there are so many people who don't care that the president tells such blatant untruths. It's bad enough that politicians tend to spin facts; at least there's a core of fact. If all politicians were to give us Trumpian level fiction, the last bit of influence by the people would evaporate.

I know you disagree, so no need to point that out. But I would like to understand your vision of the ideal President. What would he do?

I technically care that Trump has been retweeting it, it matters that he's untruthful, and it's his method of building fanaticism.

But I don't think it's productive to spend my mental energy on being outraged by it after the initial understanding. That's falling into Trump's trap, he's kind of a propaganda genius. It's a way for all the news cameras to follow his every word, moving from one public show of insanity to the next, while his base support remains untouched and attention focuses away from the policies he's helping implementing, which is what really impacts and hurts millions of lives. Attention and energy in politics is finite, and you should allocate it to what matters more.

But I would like to understand your vision of the ideal President. What would he do? — Relativist

I don't know; I don't think it should matter. As soon as politics revolves around personalities and individuals, it's over. Any system that could lead to a Trump being installed there, and a Biden being the alternative, is rotten to the core. The cult of personality that follows presidents - any president - is toxic in and of itself. A basic rule of thumb for treating anyone with any sort of power is with suspicion and contempt, unless they prove, consistently, otherwise. Practically every US president in living memory has been a sack of shit. I have every expectation that every other one will be as well.

As for Trump, it simply ought to be axiomatic that everything he touches is or will be a shitshow. That's baseline; a fact of nature, like the sun being hot. Nobody needs that reaffirmed, nobody needs to be shown yet another news story about how Trump, personally, is a Bad Person. That's just another episode in the personalization of politics that is it's trivialization.

And Biden? Sure, vote for him. It would be a deeply shameful act, but no less shameful than than being forced to do something terrible while being hostage. There's no begrudging anyone who does it. You can't hate people clawing pathetically for their survival. One hopes that one would spend every other waking moment making up for it though.

were [Biden] to drop dead tomorrow the net manevolance in the universe would correspondingly drop by a number of degrees. — StreetlightX

If Biden drops dead tomorrow, the US is fucked and the rest of the planet too.

the US is fucked and the rest of the planet too. — Olivier5

Bold presumption that this is not already the case.

I was trying to be cheerful.

the US is fucked and the rest of the planet too. — Olivier5

Well, as long as the rest of the world is fucked as well, we'd probably be okay with that. Jesus will make sure we're raptured away before really bad things start to happen, anyhow.

Jesus will only rapture the Europeans. You guys are left to Satan.

You guys are left to Satan. — Olivier5

That's our middle name!

There got to be some division of labor you see? Poor Jesus can't do everything.

Exactly. Somebody has to be Sauron, otherwise there would be no rings.

Yes, there got to be a bad guy. The Germans and the French are now playing jokari. It's your turn to play the role of the world fascist menace.

Nooooooooooo! Let the Chinese do it. They like zapping muslims with cattle prods.

The New Axis: Moscow - Beijing - Washington

Hotdogs, cabbage, and congee. :grimace:

You guys are left to Satan. — Olivier5

I've been Satan's lawyer for years now. I'll be representing him in Heaven after Judgment Day. Business is business.