#makebelieve | #WhatTheyVotedFor
Well, right there's your problem. You need to quit making shit up.
Seriously, get your head on straight.
Yeah, didn't think so.
Oh, well.
How NOT to deal with republicans
- Thread starter ElectricFetus
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Well, right there's your problem. You need to quit making shit up.
Seriously, get your head on straight.
Yeah, didn't think so.
Oh, well.
Yeah, it would. So why aren't you paying attention to the people who can help you there?
For recent example: a fortuitous hurricane combined with lucky and near-perfect timing of complete financial collapse to prevent the faction in control of the Republican Party from setting the catastrophe of failed war aside in the awareness of their voting base, and set them back a few years. They still took Congress, of course.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gM1l_kkC...cB/s1600/madison_square_nazi_rally_1939_5.jpg
That's in public. On the corporate side, GM and IBM and Dow Chemical and most of the Hollywood movie studios and so forth were doing good business with the famous and powerful and likewise capitalist German industrialists. Coca Cola was expanding its market.
More spread out in history, the KKK and the John Birch Society were very powerful. Nixon was re-elected, as was Reagan. J Edgar Hoover ran America's domestic secret police for fifty years, across two world wars and into the Vietnam War. Joseph McCarthy was a powerful public national figure (and we see recent attempts to rehab his image, in the Faction's media wing, set aside for the rapprochement with Putin's Russia).
So it's only the Clintons that have "baggage" from the 90s? Or is it that only fictional "baggage" counts?
They are, actually. Especially in the media operations, but also in Congress and throughout the Washington lobbying outfits and so forth. And especially in the financial and voting base.
1994 wasn't that long ago - a twenty year old then would be 42, 43 now. Steve Bannon (the single most important figure in the rise of your labeled "alt-right") was 40 years old in 1994. Almost everyone who watched the Fox News Business Report video edit of Obama and other lying Fox video edits in the "millions of illegal voters" campaign issue - probably the second most influential on the November vote, after the email lying campaign, one step better than the Benghazi lying campaign - was of voting age in 1994.
The Republican Party finally took its current shape, with its current power and financial centers established, its electoral base and campaign strategy put together, and only mop-up efforts to evict and/or discipline the minority "moderates" necessary (mostly accomplished by around 1994, btw), during Reagan's first term. It hasn't changed in any fundamental way since, unless one counts a significant further consolidation of its media ownership and increase in control - set in motion but not accomplished by Reagan.
It isn't real. Your perceptions have been manipulated, as have theirs, and by the same media forces and marketing professionals.
You employ vocabulary, frame issues here, and perceive as well as respond to matters I am familiar with - such as my own posting here - in near-perfect alignment with the errors and delusions of those who "see cultural Marxism".
Because they do believe it, as demonstrated not only by their claims to believe it (unlike the claims here about this one), but their consistent actions in accordance with their beliefs, and their support for such candidates as Trump, and (frankly) their obvious incapability. They couldn't pull it off.
Naturally it's possible for the entire Republican Party to be a vast sendup, a kind of flash mob organized for the purpose of satirizing democracy itself - but after thirty, forty years, the joke would be too old to enjoy as humor anyway.
Oh good we reach a consensus.
Really? http://www.businessinsider.com/alt-right-civil-war-twitter-cernovich-milo-alaska-2016-12
By the way the man Trump has delegated the whole presidency to, his son is law, Jarad Kushner, Jew. They know, they don't care.
So when you get offended by the alt-right, why not consider that they are just being "satirical" and don't really believe it?
"Because they do believe it, as demonstrated not only by their claims to believe it (unlike the claims here about this one), but their consistent actions in accordance with their beliefs, and their support for such candidates as Trump, and (frankly) their obvious incapability. They couldn't pull it off."
But politically, they of course have no principles or need for consistency. They don't care about a lot of stuff they make a big deal out of.
"Because they do believe it, as demonstrated not only by their claims to believe it (unlike the claims here about this one), but their consistent actions in accordance with their beliefs, and their support for such candidates as Trump, and (frankly) their obvious incapability. They couldn't pull it off."
So you agree - that crowd is incapable of sending itself up. For starters, they've got nowhere to go in that direction. The Poe's Law Party.
You might want to check with Steve Bannon on the personally "don't care" side. He actually doesn't like Jews, and it's personal - of course he worked with some of the worst human beings on the planet, at Goldman, and many were Jews, so it's not hard to explain his special feelings.
But politically, they of course have no principles or need for consistency. They don't care about a lot of stuff they make a big deal out of.
So you agree they are just trolls (Poe's Law) that when realizing there are real kooks among them, they don't know what to do?
Steve Bannon seems to be losing favor in the trump administration, losing his national security console position... it's probably the jews fault.
So you agree, they don't care?
The only reason anyone bothers with you anymore, for instance, is that you lie enough. We learned a generation ago that ignoring the poseurs and prissing is just as dangerous as ignoring the bullies and bullying themselves.
All your manner of empowerment got society was the empowerment of dangerous insanity.
Oh boy please do repeat so that you might make sense.
Democrats need to realize the game has changed. They need to recognize Republicans aren't their friends, and they aren't playing by the unwritten rules of civility and patriotism which have governed Washington. Those rules no longer apply. Democrats need to begin playing hardball. They need to fight fire with fire. It's way past time to stop playing nice guy.
But, that doesn't mean Democrats need to step into extremism as Republicans have done. Democrats need to be wary of repeating the mistakes which led to Reagan.
But, that doesn't mean Democrats need to step into extremism as Republicans have done. Democrats need to be wary of repeating the mistakes which led to Reagan.
If you mean just as they demand their polices of "build the wall","ban Muslim" and "repeal obamacare" we got to do demand our polices of "tax the rich" and "medicare for all" and no more compromised centrist corporatist polices. I'm all for that.
If you mean we got to start attacking them violently if need be, well they are MORE prone to violence and gun-ownership, and control the goverment now no less, so that would be losing battle for us.
Yes of course I mean the former and not the later. Democrats need to stand up for their principals. They need to be proud of their principals. They need to effectively combat the right wing misinformation machine by restoring the Fairness Doctrine among other things. They need better informed voters.
Where you and I will get into issues is the meaning of "centrists corporatist policies". You need some balance here. We do need to some balance. Corporations and wealth have too much power now. We need some balance.
Well considering how far our education standards are we are generations ways from informed voters.
I'm for very low corporate taxes, just very high taxes on personal income of corporate owners, every cent they take out of American companies is a cent taken out of our economy. But when our presidental candidate has taken millions of dollar in "donations" from health insurance companies, the principle of healthcare being a human right is probably not one she believes in.
It's not so much a matter of rates; it's a matter of what is considered taxable income. A substantial amount of income isn't considered income and therefore not taxed or given favorable tax treatment. That's how people can earn millions of dollars and pay no income tax.
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No, I think the Poe's Law crowd is sincere. Every time. I think they actually do switch back and forth in their obsessions du jour, according to their media manipulators's needs, and in the moment they really do believe what they happen to be repeating.
Politically, they're the Bandar-Log of our time - Kipling (failing to anticipate radio, television, and modern crowd control) overlooked the organizational opportunity offered by the chorus phase: "We all say so, so it must be true".
I think, for example, you really do believe "the left" abandoned its economic arguments and related themes in the last election, and spent its time "screaming" names like "racist" and "fascist" and "misogynist" at the Republican voting base.
And I think you really don't see what you are doing when you post, say, this:
In bowling, that's a gutterball. And you can't help it.
Earth to Democrat: Jimmy Carter was the least extreme, most compromising, Southern voter appealing, conservative, Clinton-like candidate available.
The Democratic Party has done nothing except repeat what led to Reagan, since it led to Reagan in the first place.
If what the Dems were doing in the runup to Reagan is the Democratic Party's notion of "extremism", the Democratic Party is a hopeless case.
Oh by all means tax dividends, bonds, stock trades!
Great principles! I'm sure most people would agree with that. I guess that's why we won the last election.
Well considering we didn't do that... I guess that's why we won the last election.
#unyieldinginsistence | #WhatTheyVotedFor
Never mind: Click for the obvious distraction.
They also seem the canaries as we mine the depths of human something or other.
You've seen that vague bit I do about how certain conservatives during the time of my youth turned out to be correct as long as we limit their projections to themselves and their own; I expect you've witnessed it in life, too, and have your own description.
But ... I mean, like, okay, so young people aren't smart enough to read L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time? Well, sometime into the new century I came across one of the lists from librarians about what was being protested, and, certes, Wrinkle was way up on the list, but the lesbian-commie-witchcraft argument caught me completely off guard for an anticommunist novel about faith in God and family as the greatest bulwark against evil, and that just happens to have a Shakespeare joke about interrogatives that somehow gets translated, by some latter generation, as elderly lesbian orgy. Turns out the one generation of conservative censor was right: Future generations of conservatives would not be capable of comprehending literature.
Moral relativism? Watch conservatives, including explicitly Christian conservatives, scramble to find justiciations, including explicitly Biblical citations, for enforcing food insecurity. Or usurping God's judgment. Or what parts of what Christ said have nothing to do with being a Christian. Turns out those grumpy old men were right; subsequent generations of grumpy, judgmental conservatives buckled under the weight of moral-relativist temptation. Coincidentally, if we attend the lack of literary and artistic comprehension, maybe we find some insight into the failure to grasp the bit about having no morals but strong ethics.
And I'm serious, though, when I do the bit about Citizenship ribbons and such; this same grumpy complaint wanted it to be about who was fastest, or strongest, or could jump the farthest, shoot the straightest, or win in a fight. They quite literally complained about the idea that being able to work and play well with others in society was some manner of virtue. And, y'know, it's all just a coincidence, isn't it, that we have in our present societal circumstance a powerful contingent for whom "citizenship" only means regulations about who is allowed to be in the country or not.
In a way, it's kind of like the white man's burden, or whatever. It is the burden of privilege. It must be weird to have all the societal advantages while apparently seething with antisocial fervor. It does, in the end, take a lot of work to manipulate society in order to get your way as much as possible, especially when, compared to the disempowered majorities, one has so much to cover.
The idea that these overlap with the blocs whose educational advocacy has accelerated and exaggerated perceptions of educational decline, and whose policies only lead to further decay, ought not be surprising. Or maybe that's wrong. Maybe it works out too neatly.
But the antisocial idiots of decades ago seem to have been correct within certain contextual boundaries. And society has managed, in giving over to these easy and selfish appeals, to short-circuit the educational basis for being smart enough to avoid such pitfalls.
And of course, Democrats who buckled to easy populism and the liberals who endorsed them, anyway, because another D on the board was one less R, have their role in that latter. I remember Oregon in the nineties; the other states have generally not failed to disappoint on that count, the weird near-mantra about accountability that boiled down to teachers proving they could meet standards on deliberately shorted budgets and then maybe the legislature would consider adequate funding; you should watch the state of Washington continue to embarrass itself on this point—or not, as the whole thing is incomprehensible.
Virtually every road out of the pit our society has dug itself requires that those whose interests led us here will more often than not be discomfited by progress. To that end, there really is nothing new about what needs to happen next, except perhaps the marvelously stupid scale of the task we have set ourselves.
Liberalism faces the same inherent deficit it always has: Easy populism is easier than complicated progress.
Take misogyny, for instance, since some would have us sacrifice women yet again at the altar of pretending to be reasonable in dealing with unyielding insistence. I have a Lysistrata joke, and there are any number of reasons about human ethics and decency requiring it remain a joke, but there is also this: It wouldn't work, anyway. Those words, again: Unyielding insistence. It is insufficient to say simply that some things need to be driven underground, as we already know there are those who will teach their children the most hideous and absurd bigotries and pride. And while many would purport in histrionics to fear the pogrom, what truly scares them is the prospect of a society in which their petty hatreds have no influence.
And that, in the end, is what it takes. Pogroms are for the unyieldingly insistent, not those who seek civilized society. Then again, in the tradition of trash and treasure, one's toxic irony is another's saving grace. The burden of civilized society is nothing less than manna from heaven unto the willing coward.
Oh, right. Canaries.
At least we know a bit about how it goes. Just watch and listen to what they do and say; we are forewarned.