******Official politics thread ******

[rebeccablack]

I'm talking about censorship. Period.
companies have a right to institute content standards on their own platforms, its literally authoritarian to argue otherwise.

[DinoTriz2]

companies have a right to institute content standards on their own platforms, its literally authoritarian to argue otherwise.

I'm not talking about social media censorship.

I'm talking about censorship. Period.

[Patriam1066]

Our sense of shame used to naturally censor us, but in the absence of faith in Christ, that no loner applies. We’ve democratized stupidity and given every moron a platform to spread disinformation, whether it be antivax nonsense or belief that illegals shouldn’t be KOS. It’s very sad that we might have to become authoritarian to save the species from our lowest common denominator

El Salvador delenda est

[rebeccablack]

I'm not talking about social media censorship.

I'm talking about censorship. Period.
dont act like you dont know what im talking about

[Patriam1066]

dont act like you dont know what im talking about

It’s not an act. He’s dumb and from Florida. He really doesn’t know

[America]

Our sense of shame used to naturally censor us, but in the absence of faith in Christ, that no loner applies. We’ve democratized stupidity and given every moron a platform to spread disinformation, whether it be antivax nonsense or belief that illegals shouldn’t be KOS. It’s very sad that we might have to become authoritarian to save the species from our lowest common denominator

El Salvador delenda est

i love you dad you are such a font of wisdum

[DinoTriz2]

It’s not an act. He’s dumb and from Florida. He really doesn’t know

https://i.imgur.com/ZfjFJO4.gif

[DinoTriz2]

Pewdiepie gets banned from Roblox for being a Trump supporter (https://youtu.be/cskmG__kZHQ)

[JurisDictum]

Pewdiepie gets banned from Roblox for being a Trump supporter (https://youtu.be/cskmG__kZHQ)

That's actually kind of a big deal. The newest generation is the one that most laps up this cultural shit. This guy is pretty big with gen z.

Its good they see early in life how stupid this dynamic is.

[Ahldagor]

They are. They get phone calls, you idiot.

I can't believe you are actually trying to defend censorship.

What next? Is eating babies a good thing too?

Censorship gave us g-funk so shut your commie mouth.

[Wonkie]

https://i.imgur.com/X0JNZiE_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

[JurisDictum]

Whats the political difference between Tim Pool and Hilary Clinton that isn't easily explained by age and gender really?

Tim Pool would probably claim to care more about outsourcing good jobs. Maybe not. Haven't heard him talk about globalization that much tbh...But I haven't seen a lot of him.

He supports:

1) Demonizing socialist as trying to give everyone an equal paycheck. Including misrepresenting Bernie's platform.

2) Argues a rising tide lifts all boats and we can't tax the wealthy too much (his rate is lower than several actual studies of people that know WTF they are talking about).

3) Doesn't propose any actual systematic solutions to our problems, and speaks in platitudes a lot.

The biggest break Clinton seems to be -- he doesn't like identity politics....but here's the thing, Clinton barely liked Identity politics...She just did it because it seemed like the smart thing to do politically at the time.

To be fair though, Tim Pool is much more against identity politics than her. He is also a bit more honest seemingly...but it might be strategic just like Clinton's honesty always was.

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/X0JNZiE_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

This is a HUGE strawman.

No one complains about being banned for saying "gas the jews".

[DinoTriz2]

Whats the political difference between Tim Pool and Hilary Clinton that isn't easily explained by age and gender really?

Tim Pool would probably claim to care more about outsourcing good jobs. Maybe not. Haven't heard him talk about globalization that much tbh...But I haven't seen a lot of him.

He supports:

1) Demonizing socialist as trying to give everyone an equal paycheck. Including misrepresenting Bernie's platform.

2) Argues a rising tide lifts all boats and we can't tax the wealthy too much (his rate is lower than several actual studies of people that know WTF they are talking about).

3) Doesn't propose any actual systematic solutions to our problems, and speaks in platitudes a lot.

The biggest break Clinton seems to be -- he doesn't like identity politics....but here's the thing, Clinton barely liked Identity politics...She just did it because it seemed like the smart thing to do politically at the time.

To be fair though, Tim Pool is much more against identity politics than her. He is also a bit more honest seemingly...but it might be strategic just like Clinton's honesty always was.

Tim Pool's favorite politician is Bernie Sanders.

He doesn't disagree with his platform.

[Wonkie]

This is a HUGE strawman.

No one complains about being banned for saying "gas the jews".

ive been on gab dude you cant lie to me

[DinoTriz2]

Non-partisan studies show social media platforms are more likely to censor conservative users than liberal ones (https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/)

[Wonkie]

Non-partisan studies show social media platforms are more likely to censor conservative users than liberal ones (https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/)

study: conservatives shrink wither and die if they do not use a slur every 24 hours

[DinoTriz2]

It's 911pm

[DinoTriz2]

study: conservatives shrink wither and die if they do not use a slur every 24 hours

They aren't censoring conservatives for offensive behavior. They just do it regardless.

People randomly get shadowbanned on Twitter and they say "whoops, that was an accident".

[Wonkie]

They aren't censoring conservatives for offensive behavior. They just do it regardless.

People randomly get shadowbanned on Twitter and they say "whoops, that was an accident".

haha!

[DinoTriz2]

haha!

Why do you think it's such a hot topic?

There's a lot of bullshit going on.

[Wonkie]

Why do you think it's such a hot topic?

There's a lot of bullshit going on.

i believe you believe that and it causes me sorrow

[DinoTriz2]

i believe you believe that and it causes me sorrow

Just like you believe there are spooky billionaires out there trying to get you

[Wonkie]

Just like you believe there are spooky billionaires out there trying to get you

Heh. Soros.

nothing personal kid

[DinoTriz2]

Heh. Soros.

nothing personal kid

No, your boogeyman is Koch.

[America]

one of you finally sighs, exasperated, and says twitter is creepy so is sheldon adelson

then you kiss

[Ahldagor]

They aren't censoring conservatives for offensive behavior. They just do it regardless.

People randomly get shadowbanned on Twitter and they say "whoops, that was an accident".


Present the data.

[DinoTriz2]

https://youtu.be/3SNtU6znf_Y

[DinoTriz2]

Present the data.

I already did

[America]

Present the D.

[DinoTriz2]

Present the D.

I did that too.

I post a picture of me getting my dick sucked, nothing happens.

I link to a manifesto, and everyone loses their mind.

[Wonkie]

fining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change “a scientific fraud.”

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
---
Mr. LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the “Eastern Establishment” and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as “lower beasts.”

Even so, Mr. LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept Mr. LaRouche’s political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies.

He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.

His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.

Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.

Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by a thousand votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20 to 40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

[DinoTriz2]

Didn't read

[Wonkie]

cant read

[DinoTriz2]

My reading comprehension can beat up your reading comprehension

[Mblake81]

Under The Bridge

https://i.imgur.com/9mKohJN.gif

Is were I drew some blood
Under the bridge downtown
I could not get enough
Under the bridge downtown
Forgot about my love
Under the bridge downtown
I gave my life away (yeah yeah)
Ooh no (no no yeah yeah)
Here I stay yeah yeah
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9TunCtR3dQ)

[America]

Bach and Mozart are sort of for gays

[America]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8f5Kj_CrY&feature=youtu.be&t=608

[JurisDictum]

Usher and Rich the Kid ‘shot at and bodyguard pistol whipped in armed robbery’ at Hollywood studio after flaunting cash and jewellery (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8415726/usher-rich-the-kid-shooting-hollywood-recording-studio-bodyguard-pistol-whipped/)

The divide between rich and poor blacks lol. Perhaps Rich the Kid can use it as motivation for next bullshit rap song where he tries to sound tough. Might work better than the cash and jewelry.

[Teppler]

I’ve been loving what AoC and this Omar girl have been doing lately. If they keep this up I’m going to have to become a progressive leftist.

It would be a grave mistake for any Trump person to criticize these two. They are set to take a major bite out of the left wing establishment. Do not criticize them.

[Wonkie]

I’ve been loving what AoC and this Omar girl have been doing lately. If they keep this up I’m going to have to become a progressive leftist.

It would be a grave mistake for any Trump person to criticize these two. They are set to take a major bite out of the left wing establishment. Do not criticize them.

https://i.imgur.com/gtEdhel.png

[Patriam1066]

I’ve been loving what AoC and this Omar girl have been doing lately. If they keep this up I’m going to have to become a progressive leftist.

It would be a grave mistake for any Trump person to criticize these two. They are set to take a major bite out of the left wing establishment. Do not criticize them.

Omar huh? Muslims should be barred from office until Constantinople is retaken

[Teppler]

Omar huh? Muslims should be barred from office until Constantinople is retaken

If that’s your opinion on Muslims that are 100% US citizens in office how do you feel about our government officials that have dual citizenships with Israel?

[DinoTriz2]

Omar huh? Muslims should be barred from office until Constantinople is retaken

I named a character "Retake Constantinople" on an online game and ended up grouping with a Turkish player.

He did not like me.

[Irulan]

It is ok to be lebenese SC. There's lots of affirmative action and low income housing available. Also muslim gangs may accept you.

[Irulan]

https://i.imgur.com/gtEdhel.png

At least it is safe to go outside as a Muslim woman.

Another girl got kidnapped off the streets running here a few weeks ago.

[DinoTriz2]

It is ok to be lebenese SC. There's lots of affirmative action and low income housing available. Also muslim gangs may accept you.

Does this mean I'm also ineligible for white privilege?

[Mblake1981]

Omar huh? Muslims should be barred from office until Constantinople is retaken

Recently watched a small motorcyle tour of Omar with Royal Jordanian (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgef_fFE9FEFZGQcHqp9aZw).

[America]

If that’s your opinion on Muslims that are 100% US citizens in office how do you feel about our government officials that have dual citizenships with Israel?

l`hes thdu it l`hes d`henk

[Irulan]

Does this mean I'm also ineligible for white privilege?

Ya. I don't see you achieving Brass Ring status where your job is to just wear a $20,000 suit and spend money on liberal propoganda aka advertising. Sorry.

Better luck in Riyadh.

[DinoTriz2]

Ya. I don't see you achieving Brass Ring status where your job is to just wear a $20,000 suit and spend money on liberal propoganda aka advertising. Sorry.

Better luck in Riyadh.

ISIS is a better fit for me anyway, tbh

[Irulan]

ISIS is a better fit for me anyway, tbh

Sunni Arabs don't like ISIS am I right?

[DinoTriz2]

Sunni Arabs don't like ISIS am I right?

I think Shiites don't like them.

I don't know what I am.

Patriam said he saw me in Iran, so I guess I'm a Shiite?

[Irulan]

I like Iran, not as much as Saudi Arabia though. I don't like Hill Arabs. Only big city ones who can afford several human trafficked slaves in addition to their white trophy wife and several sports cars.

More slaves = better work load and sharing. Happier home.

[Patriam1066]

I think Shiites don't like them.

I don't know what I am.

Patriam said he saw me in Iran, so I guess I'm a Shiite?

You look Shiite. Either Lebanese or rural / poor Iranian

[DinoTriz2]

Covington Catholic MAGA teens are cleared of any wrongdoing after independent investigation exonerates them (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/diocese-reverses-course-clears-covington-catholic-high-school-students-of-wrongdoing-after-investigation-of-viral-incident-on-mall/2019/02/13/c11195f8-2fa7-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.033ffdcb1221)

Told you they wouldn't be expelled, Wonkie :)

[DinoTriz2]

You look Shiite. Either Lebanese or rural / poor Iranian

Oh, definitely poor.

I look like a nasty piece of shit.

Probably the worst and lowest social rung of Iranian society.

Damn, it's so hard being a black man.

[feniin]

Usually, national emergencies aren’t something a president declares after talking about an issue for two years, failing to get anything done despite his party controlling both houses of Congress, and then campaigning hard on it in the midterms and losing big.

[DinoTriz2]

Usually, national emergencies aren’t something a president declares after talking about an issue for two years, failing to get anything done despite his party controlling both houses of Congress, and then campaigning hard on it in the midterms and losing big.

"losing big" lol

No, it was an average midterms.

The far left certainly lost big though, losing 71 out of 78 lol (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/09/20/far-left-candidates-did-poorly-in-the-democratic-primaries)

[feniin]

Nah

[DinoTriz2]

Nah

Excellent convincing argument.

[DinoTriz2]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/us/politics/mccabe-trump.html

Trump supporters were right about the Deep State.

[JurisDictum]

Yea the Russia investigation fell apart. Who would have thought.

It also looks like Trump might be gearing up for a war with Venezuela... The strategy will be to use this as in opportunity to harness wartime popularity and demonize socialism at the same time....

But,

IDK if people are buying it this time. And he might get cold feet when pollsters detect that. Unless Venezuela attacks us, I just don't see the hunger for more nation building in South America.

[Teppler]

Yea the Russia investigation fell apart. Who would have thought.

It also looks like Trump might be gearing up for a war with Venezuela... The strategy will be to use this as in opportunity to harness wartime popularity and demonize socialism at the same time....

But,

IDK if people are buying it this time. And he might get cold feet when pollsters detect that. Unless Venezuela attacks us, I just don't see the hunger for more nation building in South America.

Now there's a major 'shut it down' effort on talk about the real foreign influence on American politics. Israel.

[Teppler]

Shut it down! Ha, classic. Vintage

It's not hyperbole.

[DinoTriz2]

Yea the Russia investigation fell apart. Who would have thought.

It also looks like Trump might be gearing up for a war with Venezuela... The strategy will be to use this as in opportunity to harness wartime popularity and demonize socialism at the same time....

But,

IDK if people are buying it this time. And he might get cold feet when pollsters detect that. Unless Venezuela attacks us, I just don't see the hunger for more nation building in South America.

It's an interesting thought, but I honestly don't see war with Venezuela.

Sure, we're not friendly with them, but a campaign against them would be really random.

I wouldn't support a war against Venezuela.

They don't pose a threat and their citizens don't deserve saving. They've made their bed.

I don't believe in nation-building. If they don't want Democracy, that's their choice.

[JurisDictum]

Corporate Democrats Aren't Winning Any Swing Voters
(https://www.truthdig.com/articles/corporate-democrats-arent-winning-any-swing-voters/)

According to conventional wisdom, the Democrats must appeal to middle-of-the-road swing voters in order to defeat Trump in 2020. Supposedly these voters want a moderate who “crosses the partisan divide,” “finds common ground with all classes and income groups,” “removes barriers to advancement,” “builds public/private partnerships,” “works for the common good against all special interests,” “avoids the extremes of the right and the left,” and “shuns costly pie-in-the-sky programs.”

Wrong.


This observation is further confirmed by a fascinating chart prepared by Lee Drutman, (“Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond“) based on survey data from 8,000 Clinton and Trump voters compiled by the Voter Survey Group. A significant split emerged around two main clusters of opinion — economic populism and identity politics. (Unlike exit polls this survey is more than 10 times larger a sample and contains many more questions, and therefore should not be dismissed as just another poll.)

10639

Here are the 2016 voter percentage breakdowns:

Progressive Populists account for 44.6 percent of the electorate according to this study.
28.9 percent are Culturally Conservative Populists.
Arch Conservatives account for another 22.7 percent.
And a miniscule 3.8 percent for the Culturally Liberal/Fiscal Conservatives.


Keep in mind,

This is 2016 and only includes people that voted for Trump or Hilary. So I think its almost certainly over-represents the popularity of Corporate democrats and the fiscal center.

That just blows me away that in country with hundreds of years of free market fundamentalism propaganda...over half of conservatives are populist. I knew that the socially liberal economically conservative opinion was unpopular..but man is that fuckin' unpopular.

No wonder everyone agrees the media is shit. They have the least popular opinion in the country.

[Wonkie]

https://i.imgur.com/JUjwGxF.jpg

[DMN]

https://i.imgur.com/JUjwGxF.jpg

Racist.

[Wonkie]

Racist.

https://i.imgur.com/2Grd6Zo.png

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/2Grd6Zo.png

Don't bring Doug Stanhope into this.

[DinoTriz2]

Jussie Smollet faked the "Trump Supporter" attack with two extras from the Empire show because his character was being written out. (https://abc7chicago.com/sources-police-investigating-whether-smollett-staged-attack-with-help-of-others/5138497/)

Cops raided the two extras homes, found bleach and other evidence.

This comes days after Jussie appeared on GMA, saying "You would believe me if they were Muslim or Black".

The two attackers are Nigerian. We still don't believe you.

Told you so.

And guess what? Media jumped the gun again. More fake news.

Damn, it feels so good to win this often.

[DinoTriz2]

Lol (https://youtu.be/GY_kRqm9NeY)

[Wonkie]

anns twitter is great today :)

[Mblake1981]

*grumbles* (https://youtu.be/oc435oxD5Bs?t=9)

[feniin]

January 2017 - GOP Majority

January 2017 - Wall not an emergency

February 2017 - Wall not an emergency

March 2017 - Wall not an emergency

April 2017 - Wall not an emergency

May 2017 - Wall not an emergency

June 2017 - Wall not an emergency

July 2017 - Wall not an emergency

August 2017 - Wall not an emergency

September 2017 - Wall not an emergency

October 2017 - Wall not an emergency

November 2017 - Wall not an emergency

December 2017 - Wall not an emergency

January 2018 - Wall not an emergency

February 2018 - Wall not an emergency

March 2018 - Wall not an emergency

April 2018 - Wall not an emergency

May 2018 - Wall not an emergency

June 2018 - Wall not an emergency

July 2018 - Wall not an emergency

August 2018 - Wall not an emergency

September 2018 - Wall not an emergency

October 2018 - Wall not an emergency

November 2018 - Wall not an emergency

November 2018 - Democratic majority elected in House

February 2019 - EMERGENCY!!!1!!

[Cecily]

Well it’s better to realize it’s an emergency late than wait for it to be too late. Brown people? Not in my America.

[DMN]

There's less water leaking into the hull of the ship today than yesterday. This is fine.

[feniin]

You know damn well he doesn't give a shit about that wall. He just wants to divide the poor with fringe issues while the rich line their pockets.

[Mblake1981]

You know damn well he doesn't give a shit about that wall. He just wants to divide the poor with fringe issues while the rich line their pockets.

Would you like the poor unified together, or at least not so divided, and see policies that do not line the pockets of the rich?

[Mblake1981]

Is border security a real issue or one made up to divide?

If you are one of the people that are too smart to get caught up in that question, as it divides the group, and respond with "I would like to see something sensible done" then ok, can you please detail what that is or are you requesting leadership do something sensible? when we get into the details of what sensible means we have to be careful as it means different things to different people and can cause a division.

[Jibartik]

You know damn well he doesn't give a shit about that wall. He just wants to divide the poor with fringe issues while the rich line their pockets.

quick keep talking about how people who support the wall are nazi's.

[Mblake1981]

Now if the media would get onboard with the new plan, do shows to convince the poor that this new plan is sound and reasonable, whatever the plan is. This would help a great deal with healing the rift.

[Jibartik]

Is border security a real issue or one made up to divide?

If you are one of the people that are too smart to get caught up in that question, as it divides the group, and respond with "I would like to see something sensible done" then ok, can you please detail what that is or are you requesting leadership do something sensible? when we get into the details of what sensible means we have to be careful as it means different things to different people and can cause a division.

More people die by homicide by the hands of illegal immigrants every year by a long shot than they do mass shootings.

Gun regulation to prevent mass shootings is pretty important issue for the other party, why is this issue from another party wrong then?

Another thing to consider is solutions to stop mass shootings are actually unconstitutional, while building a wall is not, why is one a good idea and one a bad idea?

Do you disagree that gun laws need to be changed to prevent mass shootings?

[Wonkie]

There's less water leaking into the hull of the ship today than yesterday. This is fine.

https://i.imgur.com/kajKjb2.jpg

[Mblake1981]

I am bothered by the way we say "poors", what does that mean? someone that makes less than 40K per year? A household that makes a total of 40k per year?

I can give you some insights into the latter category.

[Mblake1981]

More people die by homicide by the hands of illegal immigrants every year by a long shot than they do mass shootings.

Gun regulation to prevent mass shootings is pretty important issue for the other party, why is this issue from another party wrong then?

Another thing to consider is solutions to stop mass shootings are actually unconstitutional, while building a wall is not, why is one a good idea and one a bad idea?

Do you disagree that gun laws need to be changed to prevent mass shootings?

Reminds me of sitting before an inquisition with cleverly asked questions. The powers that be will do what they will.

I would suggest joining the club if you can, whatever that club is, if they will let you, if it truly matters to you. Then you will not get asked such questions or if you do the answers might have already been spoken to you, or you were raised with them.

[feniin]

I am bothered by the way we say "poors", what does that mean? someone that makes less than 40K per year? A household that makes a total of 40k per year?

I can give you some insights into the latter category.

If you make less than 70k a year you're essentially poor.

[Mblake1981]

https://i.imgur.com/kajKjb2.jpg

pocket lint.

[Mblake1981]

If you make less than 70k a year you're essentially poor.

might get a raised eyebrow when you pull up to the local church's food bank in a shiny new car though.

[feniin]

More people die by homicide by the hands of illegal immigrants every year by a long shot than they do mass shootings.

Gun regulation to prevent mass shootings is pretty important issue for the other party, why is this issue from another party wrong then?

Another thing to consider is solutions to stop mass shootings are actually unconstitutional, while building a wall is not, why is one a good idea and one a bad idea?

Do you disagree that gun laws need to be changed to prevent mass shootings?
More people die to car accidents and tobacco smoke and alcohol and Big Macs than illegal immigrants, too. Your argument is retarded.

There is no national emergency. There isn't any more people coming in than before. This is a sham and you know it. Sorry you're buying into the hateful xenophobia that's washing over this country.

[JurisDictum]

I think its great. Now were just going to declare a national emergency for socialist programs.

That was some smart thinkin there Donny.

[Wonkie]

pocket lint.

indeed. btw how much money for the wall? :o

[DMN]

More people die to car accidents and tobacco smoke and alcohol and Big Macs than illegal immigrants, too. Your argument is retarded.

There is no national emergency. There isn't any more people coming in than before. This is a sham and you know it. Sorry you're buying into the hateful xenophobia that's washing over this country.

There's less water leaking into the hull of the ship today than yesterday. This is fine.

[feniin]

I think its great. Now were just going to declare a national emergency for socialist programs.

That was some smart thinkin there Donny.

National Emergency to fund Universal Healthcare? Nice.

[Mblake1981]

More people die by homicide by the hands of illegal immigrants every year by a long shot than they do mass shootings.

Gun regulation to prevent mass shootings is pretty important issue for the other party, why is this issue from another party wrong then?

Another thing to consider is solutions to stop mass shootings are actually unconstitutional, while building a wall is not, why is one a good idea and one a bad idea?

Do you disagree that gun laws need to be changed to prevent mass shootings?

More people die to car accidents and tobacco smoke and alcohol and Big Macs than illegal immigrants, too. Your argument is retarded.

There is no national emergency. There isn't any more people coming in than before. This is a sham and you know it. Sorry you're buying into the hateful xenophobia that's washing over this country.

Which is why I answered the question in the manner that I did. I was not interested in being divisive, I see Fenin and Jabartik are. Not saying you are right or wrong here. I did originally respond to Fenins post about divisiveness in which Jabartik responded to me, that is the chain of posts.

[feniin]

Which is why I answered the question in the manner that I did. I was not interested in being divisive, I see Fenin and Jabartik are. Not saying you are right or wrong here. I did originally respond to Fenins post about divisiveness in which Jabartik responded to me, that is the chain of posts.

I can't take anything you say seriously since you spent like 2 months straight just posting song memes.

[America]

I think its great. Now were just going to declare a national emergency for socialist programs.

That was some smart thinkin there Donny.

Heard a nice soundbyte by Pelosi (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/14/pelosi_democratic_president_will_now_be_able_to_de clare_national_emergency_on_guns.html)where she says declaring a national emergency to bypass Congressional control of power of the purse, war etc is unconstitutional.

Next sentence: why don't you do one for gun control? I hope you do. A democratic president could. REPUBLICANS should be frightened by this.

Respect for rule of law is fading. This preceded empire in that 1 olde example everyone overuses. She just straight up openly does not care and threatens cheerily to play chicken with the expansion of imperial power as though it has no consequences beyond partisan jockeying, and she's one of the most talented operators up there. And nobody else catches it or cares either. We have outlived our nation's foundational memes and our rulers are only very loosely bound by its laws and precedents.

[Wonkie]

I think its great. Now were just going to declare a national emergency for socialist programs.

That was some smart thinkin there Donny.

in a 5-4 decision, justice kavanaugh writing for the majority...

[feniin]

Heard a nice soundbyte by Pelosi where she says declaring a national emergency to bypass Congressional control of power of the purse, war etc is unconstitutional.

Next sentence: why don't you do one for gun control? I hope you do. A democratic president could. REPUBLICANS should be frightened by this.

Respect for rule of law is fading. This preceded empire in that 1 olde example everyone overuses. She just straight up openly does not care, and she's one of the most talented operators up there. And nobody else catches it or cares either.

I think the republicans are hoping the democrats try something like that just so they can direct their poor people into violence against the "others" who want to take their guns.

Rich people on both sides directing the violence to occur between the poor on both "sides" rather. I don't think there's ever been a case where the rich and poor are together against an injustice. One side is always the benefactor and the other the victim.

[DMN]

National Emergency to fund Universal Healthcare? Nice.

You'd have a pretty hard time coming up with a compelling reason for such a measure when you can already get medical treatment without having money in the USA.

[JurisDictum]

You'd have a pretty hard time coming up with a compelling reason for such a measure when you can already get medical treatment without having money in the USA.

Lol dude,

The case is much weaker for national emergency on immigration. You can easily make some half baked arguement about people dying from lack of healthcare. I don't think either are "national emergencies" in the formal sense. We have plenty of time to talk about this shit before doing anything.

Anyone who claims to be pro-business and argues against medicare for all is letting their pro-market ideology get in the way of common sense. Healthcare is an enormous drag on business.

[DMN]

Lol dude,

The case is much weaker for national emergency on immigration.

It's not on "immigration". it's on border control, the lack thereof.

[Misek84]

Lol dude,

The case is much weaker for national emergency on immigration. You can easily make some half baked arguement about people dying from lack of healthcare. I don't think either are "national emergencies" in the formal sense. We have plenty of time to talk about this shit before doing anything.

Anyone who claims to be pro-business and argues against medicare for all is letting their pro-market ideology get in the way of common sense. Healthcare is an enormous drag on business.

One involves people you dont know who are crossing into your country illegally, the other involves people who already get free healthcare not getting the quality of healthcare you think is sufficient. Idk but the immigration one sounds more like a national emergency than the healthcare one atleast through non-snowflake-liberal eyes.

As for the healthcare being a drag on business, of course it is but whats the solution? Until we invent the trees that grow money, healthcare needs to be paid for by someone. Either we pay for it under current system or the middle class pays double what they pay now to cover the freeloaders fully

[Wonkie]

you can tell the actual conservatives from the personality cultists based on their reaction to the border deal

[DMN]

you can tell the actual conservatives from the personality cultists based on their reaction to the border deal

Now they have ample reason to insure trump is around long enough to replace Ruth Vader. It's all a bunch of nonsnese anyway. Go look at how many times national emergencies have been called for little to no reason. Or do you really think blocking diamond importation os mre important than black drug cartels from from dumping opiates across the border?

[Wonkie]

Now they have ample reason to insure trump is around long enough to replace Ruth Vader. It's all a bunch of nonsnese anyway. Go look at how many times national emergencies have been called for little to no reason. Or do you really think blocking diamond importation os mre important than black drug cartels from from dumping opiates across the border?

https://i.imgur.com/oWCDohE.jpg

[JurisDictum]

As for the healthcare being a drag on business, of course it is but whats the solution? Until we invent the trees that grow money, healthcare needs to be paid for by someone. Either we pay for it under current system or the middle class pays double what they pay now to cover the freeloaders fully

The solution is the same solution that all the other advanced economies have. National health insurance plans. I'm not including the UK shitshow because there they have government doctors and dentists.

See, we pay twice is much for the same quality of care in this country and it keeps going up. That's just facts. This system is not better in anyway except when it comes to producing rich health insurance executives.

Judging your opinions. You get most of your views about what "snowflake liberals" are from the MSM...they represent about 3% of voters. Except for Fox which mostly represents Arch Conservatism which is like 22% of voters.

To me, the boomer generation and their individualist rebellion finding themselves mantra...that was the snowflake generation. According to generational theory, it is the Millennials that are on the same cycle like the greatest generation (WW II generation) and the last group that was like the boomers is most famous for starting Spanish Colonalism and the civil war. "Generation Evil" I believe historians sometimes call it.



High
According to Strauss and Howe, the First Turning is a High, which occurs after a Crisis. During The High institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, though those outside the majoritarian center often feel stifled by the conformity

Hero (Civic) generations enter childhood after an Awakening, during an Unraveling, a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez-faire. Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening.[55] Examples: G.I. Generation, Millennials

Famous Heroes: Thomas Jefferson and John F Kennedy

This is the situation my generation is going to create. So some guy in Gen Z (after melenials) can be like Donald Trump (silent generation) and take advantage of the society we leave them. Do well for themselves.

Sometimes after I'm dead you individualists will have your cycle again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory

Its really good take down for a wiki article

[Jibartik]

More people die to car accidents and tobacco smoke and alcohol and Big Macs than illegal immigrants, too. Your argument is retarded.

There is no national emergency. There isn't any more people coming in than before. This is a sham and you know it. Sorry you're buying into the hateful xenophobia that's washing over this country.

What are you talking about wow calm down are you ok? Why are you so upset?

Tobacco sale is banned all over the country, and there are all kinds of fat taxes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_tax) not to mention if you had to go through the same amount of work to enter the country as you do to drive a car, you'd be following republican immigration policy. Are you saying illegal immigrants should be forced to pay insurance :confused: Also for what it's worth the reason we have mandated insurance for automobiles is because illegal immigrants in the 1990's were getting into too many accidents and not having auto insurance to pay for them.

I hope you have a better day than it sounds like you have had so far. Don't be so upset.

[Misek84]

Yes yes we all keep hearing about all these great other countries and their great national health insurance plans. I come from one of those countries and there are pros and cons to those systems. In addition, the success of those systems is dependent on alot more than just having that health system such as worker participation rates and cultural attitudes towards welfare. So just cause it works positively in some countires is not a sufficent justification that it will work in this country.

[JurisDictum]

Yes yes we all keep hearing about all these great other countries and their great national health insurance plans. I come from one of those countries and there are pros and cons to those systems. In addition, the success of those systems is dependent on alot more than just having that health system such as worker participation rates and cultural attitudes towards welfare. So just cause it works positively in some countires is not a sufficent justification that it will work in this country.

You keep hearing about this, despite the billionaire media is competely bought out by health insurance and pharma lobbying. You keep hearing about it because despite the entire deck stacked against nationalized health insurance in discussions -- they can't hide the fact that it simply works better. We don't need some fucking private insurance oligopoly bleeding business and American individuals for profit.

Yes theres a problem.

No, we shouldn't do anything about it

--individualism's dead end in this era. Boomers accomplished a lot with it with civil rights....I think we all realize thats getting to be an old battle. Now its time for people that take collective action to take over again.

[Mblake81]

I can't take anything you say seriously since you spent like 2 months straight just posting song memes.

are you being devisive?

[America]

This was an excellent press conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPvAIUkczw). The way Trump subordinates these people with his hand gestures is worthy of study. Start at 40 minutes for the fireworks.

[DMN]

https://i.imgur.com/oWCDohE.jpg

My mistake, I thought you were talking about the national emergency issue.

Trump is in serious trouble if he signs that poison-pilled bill.

[Misek84]

You keep hearing about this, despite the billionaire media is competely bought out by health insurance and pharma lobbying. You keep hearing about it because despite the entire deck stacked against nationalized health insurance in discussions -- they can't hide the fact that it simply works better. We don't need some fucking private insurance oligopoly bleeding business and American individuals for profit.

Yes theres a problem.

No, we shouldn't do anything about it

--individualism's dead end in this era. Boomers accomplished a lot with it with civil rights....I think we all realize thats getting to be an old battle. Now its time for people that take collective action to take over again.

Its true “evil” insurance company exec’s in this country have a vested interested in preventing a nationalised health system and will fight that. They control alot of wealth and power. But do you know who controls even more wealth and power, the governments of countries with national healthcare. They have a vested interest to bill thier national programs as the best and resist privatization. You know who else has an interest in making nationalized health systems look good, the political class in our country because nationalization brings them more power over our lives. So the deck might be stack but in which direction?

[Wonkie]

My mistake, I thought you were talking about the national emergency issue.

Trump is in serious trouble if he signs that poison-pilled bill.

he signed it

[Lune]

Its true “evil” insurance company exec’s in this country have a vested interested in preventing a nationalised health system and will fight that. They control alot of wealth and power. But do you know who controls even more wealth and power, the governments of countries with national healthcare. They have a vested interest to bill thier national programs as the best and resist privatization. You know who else has an interest in making nationalized health systems look good, the political class in our country because nationalization brings them more power over our lives. So the deck might be stack but in which direction?

Our government answers to insurance company exec's, not to you. This is why you're mandated to buy into insurance companies. That's the system you're defending, lol.

There is no benefit to privatizing healthcare. Public or private, it is still pooled collective risk ie insurance, and the efficiency of insurance services are easily maximized by actuarial tables and clinical liaisons. The differences you get with private insurance are:

1. Marketing

2. Systematic unjustified claims denial

The insurance companies benefit from rejecting the maximum possible amount of claims and hoping you won't fight their legal army. Have fun dealing with that while unconscious.

[DMN]

he signed it

That's quite unfortunate for his reelection. Unless the democrats nominate a complete idiot, he has pretty much zero chance of winning.

[Wonkie]

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.

Shutterstock
CULTURE
THE MAGICAL THINKING OF GUYS WHO LOVE LOGIC
Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.



Aisling McCrea FEB—15—2019 09:38AM EST
Ian Danskin, who makes videos under the moniker Innuendo Studios, has made a name for himself on the internet for his YouTube series on the techniques and beliefs of the alt-right. His most recent video, “The Card Says Moops,” is worth watching in full, but there was one particular line in it that struck me. Danskin points out that, even when their beliefs skew towards the bizarre and conspiratorial, people on the online right often identify as “rationalists.”

This will be unsurprising to those who often engage with the wider online right, whether it is with someone who identifies as alt-right, libertarian, conservative, as a fan of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” or even “moderate” or “centrist” (turns out a lot of people online are self-identifying as moderate while also believing in conspiracies about “white genocide”). Although their beliefs may not be identical, there are common, distinct patterns in the way they speak (or type) that one can’t help but notice.

Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. The hosts of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House even titled their book The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason as a wink and nod to this tendency.

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies: feminists, Marxists, liberals, SJWs, and definitely the feminist Marxist liberal SJWs. You could call these men’s way of viewing the world in simple “me smart, you dumb” dichotomies Manichean, or even Derridean, if you really want to upset them by referencing a philosopher that they’ve heard is very bad.

A good illustration of this phenomenon recently appeared in a piece for MEL magazine about an increasingly disturbing trend — women whose once-promising romantic relationships implode after their boyfriends become “redpilled.” For the benefit of the blissfully uninitiated: to be “redpilled” means to internalize a set of misogynistic far-right beliefs popular with certain corners of the internet; the product of a noxious blend of junk science, conspiracy theory, and a pathological fear of social progress.

THESE MEN WILL TELL YOU, OVER AND OVER, HOW THEY LOVE TO USE LOGIC, AND HOW THE PEOPLE THEY FOLLOW ONLINE ALSO USE LOGIC. THEY ARE ALSO MASSIVE FANS OF DECLARING THAT THEY HAVE “FACTS” AND THAT THEIR ANALYSIS IS “UNBIASED.”
The men interviewed in the piece, once sweet and caring, started changing after going down a rabbit hole of extremist political content on YouTube and involving themselves in radical right-wing online communities. Convinced of their absolute correctness, these men became at first frustrated, then verbally abusive once they realized their female partners did not always agree with their new views. Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth, as a Christian missionary might put it. Every woman interviewed in the article — including those who were more formally educated than their boyfriends — makes reference to their former partners belittling their intelligence and rationality. These men were certain that they were the smart ones, that they had correctly assessed the “facts” with “logic,” and that if their womenfolk did not accept this without question, they were simply too dumb to understand.

This might not seem surprising at first — when it comes to contentious beliefs, it’s not uncommon for people to act as though their view is the inherently superior one. But what’s remarkable is how ridiculously confident these men became, in a relatively short time, in their unique philosopher-king-like possession of objective truth and superior analysis… all while copying their arguments from an echo-chamber of poorly cited webcam videos and anonymous internet comments.

These magic words do have actual definitions, as it happens, and they’re quite complicated. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a commonly used go-to site for academic summaries of philosophical topics, and it doesn’t even have a single unified article for “logic,” “reason” or “rationality”; instead they have a plethora of articles about all the myriad subtypes and debates around the topic, most of which I suspect would mystify the average self-identified logic fan (although in fairness, they would mystify most of us).

THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A SINGLE UNIFIED ARTICLE FOR “LOGIC,” “REASON” OR “RATIONALITY.”
If you’re looking for a more accessible reference, Wikipedia also breaks these terms down into subtypes. “Logic,” for example, can refer to syllogistic logic, a system in which propositions containing terms with explicit relations to each other can be used to infer a definitively valid conclusion (Socrates is a horse, all horses terrify me, therefore Socrates terrifies me — that sort of thing). Related to this type of logic are other “formal” types such as propositional, mathematical, and computational logics, but it’s rare to come across that particular type of logic online as it relates to real-life political issues; more likely you are talking about some other “informal” logic (to put it in massively oversimplified terms, a system that seeks to adhere to some standard of analysis and argumentation, which is not closed, fixed or prone to definitive conclusions in the way formal logic is).

The boundaries and definitions involved in these terms, and how we come to identify them, are hotly debated. “Rationality” is the quality of “being based on and agreeable to reason,” which is also a colossal can of worms — what is reasonable depending on the question and context, one’s interpretation of the system, one’s values and so on. These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs.

For men, especially insecure and socially dislocated men, the idea of “rationality” can be a kind of comfort blanket. Raised from birth with the stereotype that they are more “analytically intelligent” (in contrast to women, who are “emotionally intelligent”), and with pop culture that venerates “logical” characters (on a just barely related note, please enjoy this novelty Leonard Nimoy song), it’s no wonder that many young men see “logic” as a sort of personality trait to achieve — one which automatically imbues all one’s opinions with correctness — rather than a system that one may or may not be following at any one time.

The “redpill” metaphor here is telling, because it implies that obtaining knowledge and arguing well is not a skill that is slowly and indefinitely improved upon, but an achievement to be unlocked in a single moment: once you’ve swallowed the pill, you turn into a smart person, and from then on, all your opinions are correct. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of figures popular in the “redpill” community also hawk nootropic supplements.)

An interesting parallel is the use of the term “the Enlightenment” to refer to an historical period of discovery in philosophy and the sciences — a period that is often referenced by self-identified logic lovers as a sort of single-use power-up by society: first we were all lying around in mud like the serfs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then we did the Enlightenment (and by “we,” of course, they mean white European men), and then everything was smart until Marxists and feminists and poststructuralists messed it all up.

IT’S NO WONDER THAT MANY YOUNG MEN SEE “LOGIC” AS A SORT OF PERSONALITY TRAIT TO ACHIEVE RATHER THAN A SYSTEM THAT ONE MAY OR MAY NOT BE FOLLOWING AT ANY ONE TIME.
In reality, “the Enlightenment” was composed of a loose, messy assortment of people with very different ideas (you can even include Marx as an Enlightenment philosopher, if you like ). Rousseau has very little in common with Locke, and outright hated Voltaire. In addition, many Enlightenment philosophers had downright silly views on women, minorities and the like (as Silvia Federici points out in her seminal work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, many of these brilliant philosophers straight-up believed in executing witches). This does not mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but it does mean that “philosophy had one good school and then stopped being good in the 19th century” is… not a terribly sophisticated take, but one that seems more based in wanting to find a shortcut to superiority than good-faith inquiry.

A similar line of thinking can be seen in the New Atheist movement, which grew out of a reaction to the dominance of the Christian right during the George W. Bush era, as well as post-9/11 fears of Islamic fundamentalism. While there were genuine concerns to be raised about the impact of religious beliefs on public policy, what could have been a good-natured movement for secularism became a lightning rod for frustrated young men who wanted to insult people who believed in “sky-gods,” to the point where a lot of atheists began to label the movement toxic and tried to distance themselves from it.

Perhaps the nadir of the movement was 2011’s “Elevatorgate,” in which a prominent New Atheist woman mentioned that a man had behaved inappropriately to her at an atheist convention and advised other men to avoid this situation in future, and lots of atheist men promptly lost their shit. An over-the-top reaction to women speaking out against harassment is not unique to this movement; for every article praising #MeToo, there seems to be another from a Very Concerned Man who worries that everything is going too far and he’s afraid to even TALK to women now!

But I suspect the reason the reaction to Elevatorgate was so vitriolic was not just about general sexism, but also about the threat it posed to the New Atheist sense of moral superiority. It was much less fun for them to reckon with say, the complex social structures within the skeptic community, and the way that might affect the movement, than it was to make fun of some hick who couldn’t get his head round evolution. Those were the people who had some learning to do — for the New Atheists themselves, there was nothing more to learn. If people from marginalised groups within the movement started speaking about issues which involved listening and learning, or self-reflecting on one’s biases… well, that was unacceptable, since it would require wider reading and understanding of issues that were not immediately accessible or aesthetically pleasing to many New Atheist men.

In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that a lot of New Atheism devolved into reactionary, antifeminist, and even white supremacist thought, because it was never really about the things it claimed to be about. The dominant affect of New Atheism wasn’t humility, or reflexivity, or curiosity, all the things one truly needs to improve intellectually. It was smugness.

Another common characteristic of these “logickier than thou” movements is a narrow focus on the type of skill that can be classed as “intelligence.” Affinity for things like social interaction, languages, or the arts (or at least certain types of art) often don’t get a look-in. Everything must be reducible to numbers, hence the typical logic lover’s obsession with IQ.

In The Mismeasure of Man, one of the most well-known critiques of intelligence research, Stephen Jay Gould notes the dangers of scientists’ bias toward reification — the desire to find a definitive thing that is intelligence — and quantification, the desire to slap numbers on stuff. While this is understandable to an extent — things and numbers are easy to understand at-a-glance — Gould warns that this has led to bad science and perverse outcomes in the past, and threatens to mislead us into poor understandings of intelligence, at the expense of nuance and complexity. This is all of little concern to the logic lover, who wishes not to understand, but to use again and again their favorite magic words, as a shield against criticism and as a weapon against others.

A good, contemporary example of the logic incantation at work can be found in the career of Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, a popular conservative pundit with half a million Youtube subscribers and 1.86 million Twitter followers, is known for his mantra “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Youtube is full of videos titled things like “BRILLIANT Ben Shapiro DESTROYS college feminist with REASON and INTELLIGENCE.” (The prevalence of the term “destroy” is interesting — if you destroy something, it’s not there to bother you anymore, so you don’t have to worry about it any longer. Hmm.) A New York Times profile called Shapiro “the cool kid’s philosopher.” The right-leaning corners of the internet are full of admiration for just how logical he is.

THE LOGIC LOVER WISHES TO USE AGAIN AND AGAIN THEIR FAVORITE MAGIC WORDS AS A SHIELD AGAINST CRITICISM AND AS A WEAPON AGAINST OTHERS.
This is a testament to the power of branding, because on closer inspection, Shapiro isn’t a very logical person at all. In Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson laid out in a lengthy takedown how Shapiro’s admittedly sharp law-school skills belie the fact that half the time he speaks, he uses insults rather than arguments, and the other half, the arguments are usually fallacious (if you support a higher tax rate on corporations, “why not make tax rates 100 percent”?) and/or based on heavily ideological and emotional presuppositions.

Shapiro maintains that gay parents shouldn’t adopt children because “a man and a woman do a better job of raising a child than two men or two women,” relying on an old reactionary trope rather than a preponderance of the evidence that shows children adopted by same-sex couples do as well as those adopted by different-sex couples. He insists on misgendering trans people because he believes that pronouns should be used based on a person’s chromosomes, a position that would get you laughed out of a room either of medical professionals or of linguists. His position on the unlawful actions of the Israeli government, as Robinson illustrates in his takedown, seems to be entirely based on a combination of his personal religious beliefs and an insistence that Palestinian Arab civilians are “evil” (a position which has led him to support ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories).

None of this seems like “logic” to me. It seems like a person who has very strongly held presuppositions that they insist on holding onto the way a child holds onto their stuffed animal — stubbornly, and with a comically frowny face you kind of want to tickle under the chin.

“And still the brand endures,” as @dril would put it. According to his supporters, and even many who might not support him, Ben Shapiro loves facts. Why? Well, because he says he loves facts. He’s not basing his assertions on feelings, and we know this because he says that he isn’t. (Of course, to assert this as a positive thing requires the presupposition that feelings are inherently bad and irrelevant to political discourse, which is not necessarily true. But to talk about this would require an in-depth knowledge of epistemology and political philosophy, which is beyond the scope of this piece. Enough of this blabber about “the meaning of knowledge,” please. Just the facts, ma’am. ) By insisting on this interpretation of his own character, over and over, buoyed by the idolatrous support of his loyal fans and the snarky titles of his clickbait videos, Shapiro conjures into being an image of himself as The Rational Man. Say the magic words enough times, and the spell will be cast over your audience.

To be honest, even though I’m not a man, this is a tendency I understand. People want to feel smart. Calling your opinions and feelings “rational,” as opposed to the “irrational” opinions and feelings of others, is a shortcut to boosting your self-esteem. And it’s certainly not as though this tendency is unique to reactionaries; I think we’re all prone to this sometimes. The key is to recognize this for what it is — nothing more than a bias that we must overcome, in order to clearly identify how exactly we came to a viewpoint, and whether it truly holds up to scrutiny. This is important for any recent convert, whether it’s to the Intellectual Dark Web, or communism, or Crossfit. We must not mistake our imagined transfiguration from Regular Person to Omniscient Wizard for reality.

CALLING YOUR OPINIONS AND FEELINGS “RATIONAL,” AS OPPOSED TO THE “IRRATIONAL” OPINIONS AND FEELINGS OF OTHERS, IS A SHORTCUT TO BOOSTING YOUR SELF-ESTEEM.
This is my attempt to break the spell, I guess. Repeat after me: calling something logic doesn’t make it so. Calling someone rational doesn’t make it so. Opinions from Youtube men are not facts. Getting mad about philosophers you haven’t read isn’t reason. Insulting your girlfriend because she questions your sudden political shift isn’t logic. For a group of people who claim to hate the supposed redefinition of words when it comes to gender and race; for a group of people who are very mad about the postmodern tendency to say nothing means anything (or at least this is an aspect of postmodernism they seem to have gleaned from their favorite subreddits), the new young reactionaries are remarkably devil-may-care about certain words when they seem to lend credibility and strength to their opinions.

By repeating the magic words, they avoid having to deal with a gruesome fact, one that really doesn’t care about their feelings: that they are just a person on a computer with an opinion, talking to other people on computers with opinions. I don’t know what the future holds for these guys. But I do wish they’d stop playing with their magic wands.

[JurisDictum]

Privitization...the solution no one ever liked or asked for. It's always been deeply unpopular with the public (voted in on some cultural conservative platform usually). It does not lower costs in the long run, it does not stop waste fraud or abuse, and lowers the quality of jobs offered. But at least a few CEOs a shareholders make a boatload of money....

Privitization is the capitalist class cannibalizing the state. Its not much different then when 3rd would governments "sell the family jewels" by letting some outside corporate take anything of value in the country at an extreme bargain (that benefits those in power personally and not the rest of the country).

The only time privatization is in order is when the government is in a whole bunch of businesses it shouldn't be in. This happens in past communist societies (like Russia or China).

Trust me, the population as a whole is completely over the push for privatization as some kind magic bullet for our problems. It's just a con.

And that's why I don't support for-profit charter schools even though some of them are great and help good people of humble means. It's not ok for a corporation to pick the winning kids, profit off our government by underpaying teachers, and then trumpet how great privatization is at solving problems because their graduation rates are better. A lot of that can be solved just by removing the disrupters from "general pop" public school classes. That and if the upper classes would stop opportunity hording by insisting everyone have some 18th century style liberals college education with high test score before we train them in anything.

You can always pick the winning kids and poster like a great teacher. Or better yet, pick the rich kids and they just look like winner statistically no matter WTF you do at that place. See: elite for profit colleges.

[America]

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.

Shutterstock
CULTURE
THE MAGICAL THINKING OF GUYS WHO LOVE LOGIC
Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.



Aisling McCrea FEB—15—2019 09:38AM EST
Ian Danskin, who makes videos under the moniker Innuendo Studios, has made a name for himself on the internet for his YouTube series on the techniques and beliefs of the alt-right. His most recent video, “The Card Says Moops,” is worth watching in full, but there was one particular line in it that struck me. Danskin points out that, even when their beliefs skew towards the bizarre and conspiratorial, people on the online right often identify as “rationalists.”

This will be unsurprising to those who often engage with the wider online right, whether it is with someone who identifies as alt-right, libertarian, conservative, as a fan of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” or even “moderate” or “centrist” (turns out a lot of people online are self-identifying as moderate while also believing in conspiracies about “white genocide”). Although their beliefs may not be identical, there are common, distinct patterns in the way they speak (or type) that one can’t help but notice.

Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. The hosts of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House even titled their book The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason as a wink and nod to this tendency.

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies: feminists, Marxists, liberals, SJWs, and definitely the feminist Marxist liberal SJWs. You could call these men’s way of viewing the world in simple “me smart, you dumb” dichotomies Manichean, or even Derridean, if you really want to upset them by referencing a philosopher that they’ve heard is very bad.

A good illustration of this phenomenon recently appeared in a piece for MEL magazine about an increasingly disturbing trend — women whose once-promising romantic relationships implode after their boyfriends become “redpilled.” For the benefit of the blissfully uninitiated: to be “redpilled” means to internalize a set of misogynistic far-right beliefs popular with certain corners of the internet; the product of a noxious blend of junk science, conspiracy theory, and a pathological fear of social progress.

THESE MEN WILL TELL YOU, OVER AND OVER, HOW THEY LOVE TO USE LOGIC, AND HOW THE PEOPLE THEY FOLLOW ONLINE ALSO USE LOGIC. THEY ARE ALSO MASSIVE FANS OF DECLARING THAT THEY HAVE “FACTS” AND THAT THEIR ANALYSIS IS “UNBIASED.”
The men interviewed in the piece, once sweet and caring, started changing after going down a rabbit hole of extremist political content on YouTube and involving themselves in radical right-wing online communities. Convinced of their absolute correctness, these men became at first frustrated, then verbally abusive once they realized their female partners did not always agree with their new views. Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth, as a Christian missionary might put it. Every woman interviewed in the article — including those who were more formally educated than their boyfriends — makes reference to their former partners belittling their intelligence and rationality. These men were certain that they were the smart ones, that they had correctly assessed the “facts” with “logic,” and that if their womenfolk did not accept this without question, they were simply too dumb to understand.

This might not seem surprising at first — when it comes to contentious beliefs, it’s not uncommon for people to act as though their view is the inherently superior one. But what’s remarkable is how ridiculously confident these men became, in a relatively short time, in their unique philosopher-king-like possession of objective truth and superior analysis… all while copying their arguments from an echo-chamber of poorly cited webcam videos and anonymous internet comments.

These magic words do have actual definitions, as it happens, and they’re quite complicated. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a commonly used go-to site for academic summaries of philosophical topics, and it doesn’t even have a single unified article for “logic,” “reason” or “rationality”; instead they have a plethora of articles about all the myriad subtypes and debates around the topic, most of which I suspect would mystify the average self-identified logic fan (although in fairness, they would mystify most of us).

THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A SINGLE UNIFIED ARTICLE FOR “LOGIC,” “REASON” OR “RATIONALITY.”
If you’re looking for a more accessible reference, Wikipedia also breaks these terms down into subtypes. “Logic,” for example, can refer to syllogistic logic, a system in which propositions containing terms with explicit relations to each other can be used to infer a definitively valid conclusion (Socrates is a horse, all horses terrify me, therefore Socrates terrifies me — that sort of thing). Related to this type of logic are other “formal” types such as propositional, mathematical, and computational logics, but it’s rare to come across that particular type of logic online as it relates to real-life political issues; more likely you are talking about some other “informal” logic (to put it in massively oversimplified terms, a system that seeks to adhere to some standard of analysis and argumentation, which is not closed, fixed or prone to definitive conclusions in the way formal logic is).

The boundaries and definitions involved in these terms, and how we come to identify them, are hotly debated. “Rationality” is the quality of “being based on and agreeable to reason,” which is also a colossal can of worms — what is reasonable depending on the question and context, one’s interpretation of the system, one’s values and so on. These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs.

For men, especially insecure and socially dislocated men, the idea of “rationality” can be a kind of comfort blanket. Raised from birth with the stereotype that they are more “analytically intelligent” (in contrast to women, who are “emotionally intelligent”), and with pop culture that venerates “logical” characters (on a just barely related note, please enjoy this novelty Leonard Nimoy song), it’s no wonder that many young men see “logic” as a sort of personality trait to achieve — one which automatically imbues all one’s opinions with correctness — rather than a system that one may or may not be following at any one time.

The “redpill” metaphor here is telling, because it implies that obtaining knowledge and arguing well is not a skill that is slowly and indefinitely improved upon, but an achievement to be unlocked in a single moment: once you’ve swallowed the pill, you turn into a smart person, and from then on, all your opinions are correct. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of figures popular in the “redpill” community also hawk nootropic supplements.)

An interesting parallel is the use of the term “the Enlightenment” to refer to an historical period of discovery in philosophy and the sciences — a period that is often referenced by self-identified logic lovers as a sort of single-use power-up by society: first we were all lying around in mud like the serfs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then we did the Enlightenment (and by “we,” of course, they mean white European men), and then everything was smart until Marxists and feminists and poststructuralists messed it all up.

IT’S NO WONDER THAT MANY YOUNG MEN SEE “LOGIC” AS A SORT OF PERSONALITY TRAIT TO ACHIEVE RATHER THAN A SYSTEM THAT ONE MAY OR MAY NOT BE FOLLOWING AT ANY ONE TIME.
In reality, “the Enlightenment” was composed of a loose, messy assortment of people with very different ideas (you can even include Marx as an Enlightenment philosopher, if you like ). Rousseau has very little in common with Locke, and outright hated Voltaire. In addition, many Enlightenment philosophers had downright silly views on women, minorities and the like (as Silvia Federici points out in her seminal work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, many of these brilliant philosophers straight-up believed in executing witches). This does not mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but it does mean that “philosophy had one good school and then stopped being good in the 19th century” is… not a terribly sophisticated take, but one that seems more based in wanting to find a shortcut to superiority than good-faith inquiry.

A similar line of thinking can be seen in the New Atheist movement, which grew out of a reaction to the dominance of the Christian right during the George W. Bush era, as well as post-9/11 fears of Islamic fundamentalism. While there were genuine concerns to be raised about the impact of religious beliefs on public policy, what could have been a good-natured movement for secularism became a lightning rod for frustrated young men who wanted to insult people who believed in “sky-gods,” to the point where a lot of atheists began to label the movement toxic and tried to distance themselves from it.

Perhaps the nadir of the movement was 2011’s “Elevatorgate,” in which a prominent New Atheist woman mentioned that a man had behaved inappropriately to her at an atheist convention and advised other men to avoid this situation in future, and lots of atheist men promptly lost their shit. An over-the-top reaction to women speaking out against harassment is not unique to this movement; for every article praising #MeToo, there seems to be another from a Very Concerned Man who worries that everything is going too far and he’s afraid to even TALK to women now!

But I suspect the reason the reaction to Elevatorgate was so vitriolic was not just about general sexism, but also about the threat it posed to the New Atheist sense of moral superiority. It was much less fun for them to reckon with say, the complex social structures within the skeptic community, and the way that might affect the movement, than it was to make fun of some hick who couldn’t get his head round evolution. Those were the people who had some learning to do — for the New Atheists themselves, there was nothing more to learn. If people from marginalised groups within the movement started speaking about issues which involved listening and learning, or self-reflecting on one’s biases… well, that was unacceptable, since it would require wider reading and understanding of issues that were not immediately accessible or aesthetically pleasing to many New Atheist men.

In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that a lot of New Atheism devolved into reactionary, antifeminist, and even white supremacist thought, because it was never really about the things it claimed to be about. The dominant affect of New Atheism wasn’t humility, or reflexivity, or curiosity, all the things one truly needs to improve intellectually. It was smugness.

Another common characteristic of these “logickier than thou” movements is a narrow focus on the type of skill that can be classed as “intelligence.” Affinity for things like social interaction, languages, or the arts (or at least certain types of art) often don’t get a look-in. Everything must be reducible to numbers, hence the typical logic lover’s obsession with IQ.

In The Mismeasure of Man, one of the most well-known critiques of intelligence research, Stephen Jay Gould notes the dangers of scientists’ bias toward reification — the desire to find a definitive thing that is intelligence — and quantification, the desire to slap numbers on stuff. While this is understandable to an extent — things and numbers are easy to understand at-a-glance — Gould warns that this has led to bad science and perverse outcomes in the past, and threatens to mislead us into poor understandings of intelligence, at the expense of nuance and complexity. This is all of little concern to the logic lover, who wishes not to understand, but to use again and again their favorite magic words, as a shield against criticism and as a weapon against others.

A good, contemporary example of the logic incantation at work can be found in the career of Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, a popular conservative pundit with half a million Youtube subscribers and 1.86 million Twitter followers, is known for his mantra “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Youtube is full of videos titled things like “BRILLIANT Ben Shapiro DESTROYS college feminist with REASON and INTELLIGENCE.” (The prevalence of the term “destroy” is interesting — if you destroy something, it’s not there to bother you anymore, so you don’t have to worry about it any longer. Hmm.) A New York Times profile called Shapiro “the cool kid’s philosopher.” The right-leaning corners of the internet are full of admiration for just how logical he is.

THE LOGIC LOVER WISHES TO USE AGAIN AND AGAIN THEIR FAVORITE MAGIC WORDS AS A SHIELD AGAINST CRITICISM AND AS A WEAPON AGAINST OTHERS.
This is a testament to the power of branding, because on closer inspection, Shapiro isn’t a very logical person at all. In Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson laid out in a lengthy takedown how Shapiro’s admittedly sharp law-school skills belie the fact that half the time he speaks, he uses insults rather than arguments, and the other half, the arguments are usually fallacious (if you support a higher tax rate on corporations, “why not make tax rates 100 percent”?) and/or based on heavily ideological and emotional presuppositions.

Shapiro maintains that gay parents shouldn’t adopt children because “a man and a woman do a better job of raising a child than two men or two women,” relying on an old reactionary trope rather than a preponderance of the evidence that shows children adopted by same-sex couples do as well as those adopted by different-sex couples. He insists on misgendering trans people because he believes that pronouns should be used based on a person’s chromosomes, a position that would get you laughed out of a room either of medical professionals or of linguists. His position on the unlawful actions of the Israeli government, as Robinson illustrates in his takedown, seems to be entirely based on a combination of his personal religious beliefs and an insistence that Palestinian Arab civilians are “evil” (a position which has led him to support ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories).

None of this seems like “logic” to me. It seems like a person who has very strongly held presuppositions that they insist on holding onto the way a child holds onto their stuffed animal — stubbornly, and with a comically frowny face you kind of want to tickle under the chin.

“And still the brand endures,” as @dril would put it. According to his supporters, and even many who might not support him, Ben Shapiro loves facts. Why? Well, because he says he loves facts. He’s not basing his assertions on feelings, and we know this because he says that he isn’t. (Of course, to assert this as a positive thing requires the presupposition that feelings are inherently bad and irrelevant to political discourse, which is not necessarily true. But to talk about this would require an in-depth knowledge of epistemology and political philosophy, which is beyond the scope of this piece. Enough of this blabber about “the meaning of knowledge,” please. Just the facts, ma’am. ) By insisting on this interpretation of his own character, over and over, buoyed by the idolatrous support of his loyal fans and the snarky titles of his clickbait videos, Shapiro conjures into being an image of himself as The Rational Man. Say the magic words enough times, and the spell will be cast over your audience.

To be honest, even though I’m not a man, this is a tendency I understand. People want to feel smart. Calling your opinions and feelings “rational,” as opposed to the “irrational” opinions and feelings of others, is a shortcut to boosting your self-esteem. And it’s certainly not as though this tendency is unique to reactionaries; I think we’re all prone to this sometimes. The key is to recognize this for what it is — nothing more than a bias that we must overcome, in order to clearly identify how exactly we came to a viewpoint, and whether it truly holds up to scrutiny. This is important for any recent convert, whether it’s to the Intellectual Dark Web, or communism, or Crossfit. We must not mistake our imagined transfiguration from Regular Person to Omniscient Wizard for reality.

CALLING YOUR OPINIONS AND FEELINGS “RATIONAL,” AS OPPOSED TO THE “IRRATIONAL” OPINIONS AND FEELINGS OF OTHERS, IS A SHORTCUT TO BOOSTING YOUR SELF-ESTEEM.
This is my attempt to break the spell, I guess. Repeat after me: calling something logic doesn’t make it so. Calling someone rational doesn’t make it so. Opinions from Youtube men are not facts. Getting mad about philosophers you haven’t read isn’t reason. Insulting your girlfriend because she questions your sudden political shift isn’t logic. For a group of people who claim to hate the supposed redefinition of words when it comes to gender and race; for a group of people who are very mad about the postmodern tendency to say nothing means anything (or at least this is an aspect of postmodernism they seem to have gleaned from their favorite subreddits), the new young reactionaries are remarkably devil-may-care about certain words when they seem to lend credibility and strength to their opinions.

By repeating the magic words, they avoid having to deal with a gruesome fact, one that really doesn’t care about their feelings: that they are just a person on a computer with an opinion, talking to other people on computers with opinions. I don’t know what the future holds for these guys. But I do wish they’d stop playing with their magic wands.

Privitization...the solution no one ever liked or asked for. It's always been deeply unpopular with the public (voted in on some cultural conservative platform usually). It does not lower costs in the long run, it does not stop waste fraud or abuse, and lowers the quality of jobs offered. But at least a few CEOs a shareholders make a boatload of money....

Privitization is the capitalist class cannibalizing the state. Its not much different then when 3rd would governments "sell the family jewels" by letting some outside corporate take anything of value in the country at an extreme bargain (that benefits those in power personally and not the rest of the country).

The only time privatization is in order is when the government is in a whole bunch of businesses it shouldn't be in. This happens in past communist societies (like Russia or China).

Trust me, the population as a whole is completely over the push for privatization as some kind magic bullet for our problems. It's just a con.

And that's why I don't support for-profit charter schools even though some of them are great and help good people of humble means. It's not ok for a corporation to pick the winning kids, profit off our government by underpaying teachers, and then trumpet how great privatization is at solving problems because their graduation rates are better.

You can always pick the winning kids and poster like a great teacher. Or better yet, pick the rich kids and they just look like winner statistically no matter WTF you do at that place. See: elite for profit colleges.

totally read these

[rollin5k]

lots of drugs today
drugs (https://youtu.be/-xY_D8SMNtE)

[JurisDictum]

Joe stands to get taxed pretty high under a socialist government. Otherwise I think he would be more on board. He's ok anyway.

Maybe taxing wealth is a better idea that taxing yearly so much.

[JurisDictum]

Well the full crisis might not have happened yet I agree with that...Strauss died before he could see developments or he might have agreed himself...

Its worth noting he predicted there would be a crisis with generational overtones, way before it manifested.

The more I think about it the more I agree the full crisis should occur this year or so...maybe next.

[JurisDictum]

The Republic is one my favorite books. There is a lot going on there and its very readable almost kind of fun...much better than reading Aristotle's textbook style.

The primary point of the book is that Justice is not "the will of the strong." Justice, is a just society. He describes such a society.

Aristotle thought Plato was unrealistic and totalitarian. But the Republic still has a lot of ideals that are still in western society. The concept of meritocracy and respect for educated elites. The rest is from his student Aristotle, and then later some Christian stuff under Augustus and Aquinas who resurrected these guys ideas.

Everything else in the college western cannon is considered "modern" beyond that point.

You probably know some of this I'm just saying.

The crisis is obviously the next stock market crash...and humpty dumpty isn't going to be able to put everything back together again.

I think the fact that trump was elected right before the crisis...would indicate that blaming immigrants and returning to traditional conservative values is not linned up. Rather, I think my generation clearly is much more likely to swing violently left after the next crisis.

I don't think that's just wishful thinking. I think there is some writing on the wall when you look at millennial opinions and Trump's border wall thing blowing up in his face.

Just think about this a minute...what you finally start getting ahead after the 2008 crash only to be laid off in a 2019 crash....

FUCK THAT

[Raev]

I own some SPY 2020 puts. We'll see how that goes.

TLSA still hanging around $300. Did you take your profits at 320? I'm starting to wonder if I should put on a super short term TSLA crash options trade. I think there is a reasonable (say 10-20% chance) that TSLA has engaged in some outright fraud regarding their ABL and PwC isn't willing to sign off on their 2018 audit.

I view the 4th turning theory as a subset of R/K theory based on different generations. The first turning is K leadership and K youth, second is K leadership and R youth, third is R leadership and R youth, and the fourth is R leadership and K youth.

Rather, I think my generation clearly is much more likely to swing violently left after the next crisis.

Everyone will happily dump civil rights for more free stuff. I don't think cretins like Feniin will abandon socialism until they've spent 10 years living the Venezuelan life.

[JurisDictum]

Socialism is still popular in Venezula. You understand there are big fruit producers that are trying to overthrow the government so they can go back to the old ways right? (they get everything, most get nothing). That doesn't prove Venezuelan socialism is working well or anything, but it does tell me you need to take the neocon news articles in CNN and Fox with a grain of salt.

I think Venezuela is not a good government because its a communist authoritarian interpretation alla Stalin/Mao style. This is why MSM and rightist want to make Venezuela the face of American socialism.

Well It goes over really well for those that want to believe you. And everyone else laughs about how childish that is.

Including the Venezuelan people that understand their government is in some ways corrupt and authoritarian. But its still better than neoliberalism.

For the poor.

That's why middle class is important. That's why you don't steal people's houses and wages.

[Ahldagor]

Is border security a real issue or one made up to divide?

If you are one of the people that are too smart to get caught up in that question, as it divides the group, and respond with "I would like to see something sensible done" then ok, can you please detail what that is or are you requesting leadership do something sensible? when we get into the details of what sensible means we have to be careful as it means different things to different people and can cause a division.

The snensible thing is to laugh at the chaos of it all. Seriously, the dog and pony show is perpetual, but its fog machine is failing due to improper maintenance.

[JurisDictum]

She floored Putin in a judo sparring session, forcing him to 'get real' (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8435517/woman-floors-putin-in-judo-sparring-session-forcing-him-to-get-real-but-you-didnt-see-pics-due-to-cover-up/)

I think its pretty impressive he is sparring with young judo Olympians myself. I would like see the Donald try a few rounds.

But then again, Maybe he could just grab her by the pussy and take her down.

[Mblake81]

She floored Putin in a judo sparring session, forcing him to 'get real' (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8435517/woman-floors-putin-in-judo-sparring-session-forcing-him-to-get-real-but-you-didnt-see-pics-due-to-cover-up/)

I think its pretty impressive he is sparring with young judo Olympians myself. I would like see the Donald try a few rounds.

But then again, Maybe he could just grab her by the pussy and take her down.

Don't grab me, bro!

https://i.imgur.com/UpU9EE3.jpg?1

[DinoTriz2]

I support the national emergency call.

None of you motherfuckers cared when Obama called it...TO BOMB OTHER COUNTRIES.

Fucking hypocrites lol

Oh, and it'll be contested in courts well past 2020, so it'll help Trump with reelection.

Fuckin cucked you lol

WALL UP

[Ahldagor]

I support the national emergency call.

None of you motherfuckers cared when Obama called it...TO BOMB OTHER COUNTRIES.

Fucking hypocrites lol

Oh, and it'll be contested in courts well past 2020, so it'll help Trump with reelection.

Fuckin cucked you lol

WALL UP

What's to contest in court? Congress controls the purse in all situations. Checks and balances, yo.

[Wonkie]

I support the national emergency call.

None of you motherfuckers cared when Obama called it...TO BOMB OTHER COUNTRIES.

Fucking hypocrites lol

Oh, and it'll be contested in courts well past 2020, so it'll help Trump with reelection.

Fuckin cucked you lol

WALL UP

usually congress is on board for reasons of bipartisanship, but it's an adversarial relationship with trump for now. i think they think he "plays for the wrong team" if you get my meaning :p

[DinoTriz2]

What's to contest in court? Congress controls the purse in all situations. Checks and balances, yo.

Not in this situation, they don't.

Which is why everyone is whining.

Thanks for the 8 billion :D

WALL UP

[Wonkie]

abrogating constitutional precedent to own the libs

[DinoTriz2]

abrogating constitutional precedent to own the libs

Yep, and you were silent when Obama did it, so fuck off with your morality policing.

[DinoTriz2]

Democrats are race hustlers (https://youtu.be/S0L_HuBpSGU)

[Wonkie]

Yep, and you were silent when Obama did it, so fuck off with your morality policing.

im waiting for popehat to tell me my opinion :3

[DinoTriz2]

im waiting for popehat to tell me my opinion :3

Sounds about right.

I don't think I've ever seen you think for yourself.

[DinoTriz2]

Two Nigerian brothers are released after being arrested for battery, with all charges dropped. Presumably they cut a deal.

Jussie Smollet lawyers up, hiring a high profile defense attorney (https://youtu.be/AGWagEpPCGc)

To all the people who said, "If you wear a Trump hat, you attacked Smollet"....

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Jesus, you guys can't stop fucking up.

Just another hoax hate crime that the press reported as truth lol

[Wonkie]

Sounds about right.

I don't think I've ever seen you think for yourself.

if the result of you free thinking is "but Obama" I am unimpressed.

try sports dude

[feniin]

God damn you're an ignorant son of a bitch Dino. Using executive power to declare a fake national emergency to fund a useless border wall is basically saying "fuck you, I'm king" and ignoring the constitutional system of government we're supposedly so proud of.

But hey, fuck checks and balances. Fuck equal branches. One dude who got less votes than the other can go ahead and decide he's a monarch and do whatever he wants because the Senate majority is too fucking spineless to call him on his bullshit. Great job. Hope you'll be just as happy to support these over reaching power grabs when a Democrat does it.

[JurisDictum]

Technically the founders wanted Congress to have more power. The courts were givin a kind of informal co-equal status -- but the constitution never framed it that way.

The Presidency has increased in power over time. It used to be a glorified desk clerk.

Congress has always been a conservative institution (small c). So when people wanted change it often become the president that speared the charge and executed popular will. So, to save the American system from itself...the president has become more and more powerful and important.

This might just be the next step.

I would encourage people to think about the presidency not the just the current president.

[Irulan]

The senate hired this xude to take the flak through the body of the electorate.

In some ways this xude really sux for me, but maybe I would have killed myself already in the Hillary time-line anyway.

I can't predict the future.

This may be the best time line.

The country wanted to slow down. It has. It sux for coastal babes like m'wah. But R is your body really ready?

This is a vlassic delema. Hope we don't wind up like Venezuela or the Ukraine.

Loose some weight and put on some red lipstick n get out there on the streets to preach if u want change bb.

[Mblake81]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/

There are worse things in the world to roll on the floor with.

https://i.imgur.com/jcRf1TY.jpg?1

[Irulan]

There are worse things in the world to roll on the floor with.

https://i.imgur.com/jcRf1TY.jpg?1

Would let her roll me on the floor too :p

[DinoTriz2]

God damn you're an ignorant son of a bitch Dino. Using executive power to declare a fake national emergency to fund a useless border wall is basically saying "fuck you, I'm king" and ignoring the constitutional system of government we're supposedly so proud of.

But hey, fuck checks and balances. Fuck equal branches. One dude who got less votes than the other can go ahead and decide he's a monarch and do whatever he wants because the Senate majority is too fucking spineless to call him on his bullshit. Great job. Hope you'll be just as happy to support these over reaching power grabs when a Democrat does it.

Another idiot who was silent when Obama used the same tactic to bomb other countries.

Save your bullshit. I'm not buying it.

[Lune]

don't like hardbodies in women

thin pale and doughy, like a crepe

[Irulan]

don't like hardbodies in women

thin pale and doughy, like a crepe

Im still a little bit soft lol.

Honestly don't think I have what it takes to get rock hard, but we nevah really know.

[America]

don't like hardbodies in women

thin pale and doughy, like a crepe

now that psychiatric medication has erased my eating disorder & let me turn meself a mite to squish i think i ackchyually agree

[Patriam1066]

There are worse things in the world to roll on the floor with.

https://i.imgur.com/jcRf1TY.jpg?1

That haircut delenda est

[Mblake81]

That haircut delenda est

different strokes, different folks.

[Irulan]

Mine is better right now tbh

[DMN]

She gives me dude vibes.

[America]

Mine is better right now tbh

unironic non-sycophant agree

[misterbonkers]

you are a low t wimp that tried to become a girl because you are such a pussy

loser

so you -are- the mario dude, got it

[Irulan]

She gives me dude vibes.

Yeah.

unironic non-sycophant agree

:D

you are a low t wimp that tried to become a girl because you are such a pussy

loser

:cool:

so you -are- the mario dude, got it
:)

[Patriam1066]

so you -are- the mario dude, got it

100%

[Wonkie]

mario has the capacity to be funny it sux alot he'd rather be rude and boring

[Irulan]

mario has the capacity to be funny it sux alot he'd rather be rude and boring

Do tell. They are like my bigliest fan. Give us the dirt.!

[JurisDictum]

10642

Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.

In between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is a group that has been doing just fine. It has held on to its share of a growing pie decade after decade. And as a group, it owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined. In the tale of three classes (see Figure 1), it is represented by the gold line floating high and steady while the other two duke it out. You’ll find the new aristocracy there. We are the 9.9 percent.

It's a very interesting article. One of the first things Marxist movements would start doing in the old days is conduct essays on class analysis for the specific country in question.

Before finding out how to redistribute, and which classes are likely to be reliable, it's a necessary first step.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

The thing is, I think the author might be missing an important point. A lot of these wealth measurements ignore much of the wealth of big multi-national corporations that were started and are maintained mostly in America. So it misses the fact that huge profits from the globe that uses our ever-more-expensive government/military apparatus are concentrated even more with the .01 (perhaps at the expense of growth in the 9.9% share of the pie).

[Wonkie]

10642



It's a very interesting article. One of the first things Marxist movements would start doing in the old days is conduct essays on class analysis for the specific country in question.

Before finding out how to redistribute, and which classes are likely to be reliable, it's a necessary first step.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

The thing is, I think the author might be missing an important point. A lot of these wealth measurements ignore much of the wealth of big multi-national corporations that were started and are maintained mostly in America. So it misses the fact that huge profits from the globe that uses our ever-more-expensive government/military apparatus are concentrated even more with the .01 (perhaps at the expense of growth in the 9.9% share of the pie).

just say landlords

[Cecily]

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.

Shutterstock
CULTURE
THE MAGICAL THINKING OF GUYS WHO LOVE LOGIC
Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.



Aisling McCrea FEB—15—2019 09:38AM EST
Ian Danskin, who makes videos under the moniker Innuendo Studios, has made a name for himself on the internet for his YouTube series on the techniques and beliefs of the alt-right. His most recent video, “The Card Says Moops,” is worth watching in full, but there was one particular line in it that struck me. Danskin points out that, even when their beliefs skew towards the bizarre and conspiratorial, people on the online right often identify as “rationalists.”

This will be unsurprising to those who often engage with the wider online right, whether it is with someone who identifies as alt-right, libertarian, conservative, as a fan of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” or even “moderate” or “centrist” (turns out a lot of people online are self-identifying as moderate while also believing in conspiracies about “white genocide”). Although their beliefs may not be identical, there are common, distinct patterns in the way they speak (or type) that one can’t help but notice.

Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions. The hosts of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House even titled their book The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason as a wink and nod to this tendency.

These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage, squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their “emotional” and “irrational” enemies: feminists, Marxists, liberals, SJWs, and definitely the feminist Marxist liberal SJWs. You could call these men’s way of viewing the world in simple “me smart, you dumb” dichotomies Manichean, or even Derridean, if you really want to upset them by referencing a philosopher that they’ve heard is very bad.

A good illustration of this phenomenon recently appeared in a piece for MEL magazine about an increasingly disturbing trend — women whose once-promising romantic relationships implode after their boyfriends become “redpilled.” For the benefit of the blissfully uninitiated: to be “redpilled” means to internalize a set of misogynistic far-right beliefs popular with certain corners of the internet; the product of a noxious blend of junk science, conspiracy theory, and a pathological fear of social progress.

THESE MEN WILL TELL YOU, OVER AND OVER, HOW THEY LOVE TO USE LOGIC, AND HOW THE PEOPLE THEY FOLLOW ONLINE ALSO USE LOGIC. THEY ARE ALSO MASSIVE FANS OF DECLARING THAT THEY HAVE “FACTS” AND THAT THEIR ANALYSIS IS “UNBIASED.”
The men interviewed in the piece, once sweet and caring, started changing after going down a rabbit hole of extremist political content on YouTube and involving themselves in radical right-wing online communities. Convinced of their absolute correctness, these men became at first frustrated, then verbally abusive once they realized their female partners did not always agree with their new views. Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth, as a Christian missionary might put it. Every woman interviewed in the article — including those who were more formally educated than their boyfriends — makes reference to their former partners belittling their intelligence and rationality. These men were certain that they were the smart ones, that they had correctly assessed the “facts” with “logic,” and that if their womenfolk did not accept this without question, they were simply too dumb to understand.

This might not seem surprising at first — when it comes to contentious beliefs, it’s not uncommon for people to act as though their view is the inherently superior one. But what’s remarkable is how ridiculously confident these men became, in a relatively short time, in their unique philosopher-king-like possession of objective truth and superior analysis… all while copying their arguments from an echo-chamber of poorly cited webcam videos and anonymous internet comments.

These magic words do have actual definitions, as it happens, and they’re quite complicated. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a commonly used go-to site for academic summaries of philosophical topics, and it doesn’t even have a single unified article for “logic,” “reason” or “rationality”; instead they have a plethora of articles about all the myriad subtypes and debates around the topic, most of which I suspect would mystify the average self-identified logic fan (although in fairness, they would mystify most of us).

THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A SINGLE UNIFIED ARTICLE FOR “LOGIC,” “REASON” OR “RATIONALITY.”
If you’re looking for a more accessible reference, Wikipedia also breaks these terms down into subtypes. “Logic,” for example, can refer to syllogistic logic, a system in which propositions containing terms with explicit relations to each other can be used to infer a definitively valid conclusion (Socrates is a horse, all horses terrify me, therefore Socrates terrifies me — that sort of thing). Related to this type of logic are other “formal” types such as propositional, mathematical, and computational logics, but it’s rare to come across that particular type of logic online as it relates to real-life political issues; more likely you are talking about some other “informal” logic (to put it in massively oversimplified terms, a system that seeks to adhere to some standard of analysis and argumentation, which is not closed, fixed or prone to definitive conclusions in the way formal logic is).

The boundaries and definitions involved in these terms, and how we come to identify them, are hotly debated. “Rationality” is the quality of “being based on and agreeable to reason,” which is also a colossal can of worms — what is reasonable depending on the question and context, one’s interpretation of the system, one’s values and so on. These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs.

For men, especially insecure and socially dislocated men, the idea of “rationality” can be a kind of comfort blanket. Raised from birth with the stereotype that they are more “analytically intelligent” (in contrast to women, who are “emotionally intelligent”), and with pop culture that venerates “logical” characters (on a just barely related note, please enjoy this novelty Leonard Nimoy song), it’s no wonder that many young men see “logic” as a sort of personality trait to achieve — one which automatically imbues all one’s opinions with correctness — rather than a system that one may or may not be following at any one time.

The “redpill” metaphor here is telling, because it implies that obtaining knowledge and arguing well is not a skill that is slowly and indefinitely improved upon, but an achievement to be unlocked in a single moment: once you’ve swallowed the pill, you turn into a smart person, and from then on, all your opinions are correct. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of figures popular in the “redpill” community also hawk nootropic supplements.)

An interesting parallel is the use of the term “the Enlightenment” to refer to an historical period of discovery in philosophy and the sciences — a period that is often referenced by self-identified logic lovers as a sort of single-use power-up by society: first we were all lying around in mud like the serfs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then we did the Enlightenment (and by “we,” of course, they mean white European men), and then everything was smart until Marxists and feminists and poststructuralists messed it all up.

IT’S NO WONDER THAT MANY YOUNG MEN SEE “LOGIC” AS A SORT OF PERSONALITY TRAIT TO ACHIEVE RATHER THAN A SYSTEM THAT ONE MAY OR MAY NOT BE FOLLOWING AT ANY ONE TIME.
In reality, “the Enlightenment” was composed of a loose, messy assortment of people with very different ideas (you can even include Marx as an Enlightenment philosopher, if you like ). Rousseau has very little in common with Locke, and outright hated Voltaire. In addition, many Enlightenment philosophers had downright silly views on women, minorities and the like (as Silvia Federici points out in her seminal work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, many of these brilliant philosophers straight-up believed in executing witches). This does not mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but it does mean that “philosophy had one good school and then stopped being good in the 19th century” is… not a terribly sophisticated take, but one that seems more based in wanting to find a shortcut to superiority than good-faith inquiry.

A similar line of thinking can be seen in the New Atheist movement, which grew out of a reaction to the dominance of the Christian right during the George W. Bush era, as well as post-9/11 fears of Islamic fundamentalism. While there were genuine concerns to be raised about the impact of religious beliefs on public policy, what could have been a good-natured movement for secularism became a lightning rod for frustrated young men who wanted to insult people who believed in “sky-gods,” to the point where a lot of atheists began to label the movement toxic and tried to distance themselves from it.

Perhaps the nadir of the movement was 2011’s “Elevatorgate,” in which a prominent New Atheist woman mentioned that a man had behaved inappropriately to her at an atheist convention and advised other men to avoid this situation in future, and lots of atheist men promptly lost their shit. An over-the-top reaction to women speaking out against harassment is not unique to this movement; for every article praising #MeToo, there seems to be another from a Very Concerned Man who worries that everything is going too far and he’s afraid to even TALK to women now!

But I suspect the reason the reaction to Elevatorgate was so vitriolic was not just about general sexism, but also about the threat it posed to the New Atheist sense of moral superiority. It was much less fun for them to reckon with say, the complex social structures within the skeptic community, and the way that might affect the movement, than it was to make fun of some hick who couldn’t get his head round evolution. Those were the people who had some learning to do — for the New Atheists themselves, there was nothing more to learn. If people from marginalised groups within the movement started speaking about issues which involved listening and learning, or self-reflecting on one’s biases… well, that was unacceptable, since it would require wider reading and understanding of issues that were not immediately accessible or aesthetically pleasing to many New Atheist men.

In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that a lot of New Atheism devolved into reactionary, antifeminist, and even white supremacist thought, because it was never really about the things it claimed to be about. The dominant affect of New Atheism wasn’t humility, or reflexivity, or curiosity, all the things one truly needs to improve intellectually. It was smugness.

Another common characteristic of these “logickier than thou” movements is a narrow focus on the type of skill that can be classed as “intelligence.” Affinity for things like social interaction, languages, or the arts (or at least certain types of art) often don’t get a look-in. Everything must be reducible to numbers, hence the typical logic lover’s obsession with IQ.

In The Mismeasure of Man, one of the most well-known critiques of intelligence research, Stephen Jay Gould notes the dangers of scientists’ bias toward reification — the desire to find a definitive thing that is intelligence — and quantification, the desire to slap numbers on stuff. While this is understandable to an extent — things and numbers are easy to understand at-a-glance — Gould warns that this has led to bad science and perverse outcomes in the past, and threatens to mislead us into poor understandings of intelligence, at the expense of nuance and complexity. This is all of little concern to the logic lover, who wishes not to understand, but to use again and again their favorite magic words, as a shield against criticism and as a weapon against others.

A good, contemporary example of the logic incantation at work can be found in the career of Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, a popular conservative pundit with half a million Youtube subscribers and 1.86 million Twitter followers, is known for his mantra “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Youtube is full of videos titled things like “BRILLIANT Ben Shapiro DESTROYS college feminist with REASON and INTELLIGENCE.” (The prevalence of the term “destroy” is interesting — if you destroy something, it’s not there to bother you anymore, so you don’t have to worry about it any longer. Hmm.) A New York Times profile called Shapiro “the cool kid’s philosopher.” The right-leaning corners of the internet are full of admiration for just how logical he is.

THE LOGIC LOVER WISHES TO USE AGAIN AND AGAIN THEIR FAVORITE MAGIC WORDS AS A SHIELD AGAINST CRITICISM AND AS A WEAPON AGAINST OTHERS.
This is a testament to the power of branding, because on closer inspection, Shapiro isn’t a very logical person at all. In Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson laid out in a lengthy takedown how Shapiro’s admittedly sharp law-school skills belie the fact that half the time he speaks, he uses insults rather than arguments, and the other half, the arguments are usually fallacious (if you support a higher tax rate on corporations, “why not make tax rates 100 percent”?) and/or based on heavily ideological and emotional presuppositions.

Shapiro maintains that gay parents shouldn’t adopt children because “a man and a woman do a better job of raising a child than two men or two women,” relying on an old reactionary trope rather than a preponderance of the evidence that shows children adopted by same-sex couples do as well as those adopted by different-sex couples. He insists on misgendering trans people because he believes that pronouns should be used based on a person’s chromosomes, a position that would get you laughed out of a room either of medical professionals or of linguists. His position on the unlawful actions of the Israeli government, as Robinson illustrates in his takedown, seems to be entirely based on a combination of his personal religious beliefs and an insistence that Palestinian Arab civilians are “evil” (a position which has led him to support ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories).

None of this seems like “logic” to me. It seems like a person who has very strongly held presuppositions that they insist on holding onto the way a child holds onto their stuffed animal — stubbornly, and with a comically frowny face you kind of want to tickle under the chin.

“And still the brand endures,” as @dril would put it. According to his supporters, and even many who might not support him, Ben Shapiro loves facts. Why? Well, because he says he loves facts. He’s not basing his assertions on feelings, and we know this because he says that he isn’t. (Of course, to assert this as a positive thing requires the presupposition that feelings are inherently bad and irrelevant to political discourse, which is not necessarily true. But to talk about this would require an in-depth knowledge of epistemology and political philosophy, which is beyond the scope of this piece. Enough of this blabber about “the meaning of knowledge,” please. Just the facts, ma’am. ) By insisting on this interpretation of his own character, over and over, buoyed by the idolatrous support of his loyal fans and the snarky titles of his clickbait videos, Shapiro conjures into being an image of himself as The Rational Man. Say the magic words enough times, and the spell will be cast over your audience.

To be honest, even though I’m not a man, this is a tendency I understand. People want to feel smart. Calling your opinions and feelings “rational,” as opposed to the “irrational” opinions and feelings of others, is a shortcut to boosting your self-esteem. And it’s certainly not as though this tendency is unique to reactionaries; I think we’re all prone to this sometimes. The key is to recognize this for what it is — nothing more than a bias that we must overcome, in order to clearly identify how exactly we came to a viewpoint, and whether it truly holds up to scrutiny. This is important for any recent convert, whether it’s to the Intellectual Dark Web, or communism, or Crossfit. We must not mistake our imagined transfiguration from Regular Person to Omniscient Wizard for reality.

CALLING YOUR OPINIONS AND FEELINGS “RATIONAL,” AS OPPOSED TO THE “IRRATIONAL” OPINIONS AND FEELINGS OF OTHERS, IS A SHORTCUT TO BOOSTING YOUR SELF-ESTEEM.
This is my attempt to break the spell, I guess. Repeat after me: calling something logic doesn’t make it so. Calling someone rational doesn’t make it so. Opinions from Youtube men are not facts. Getting mad about philosophers you haven’t read isn’t reason. Insulting your girlfriend because she questions your sudden political shift isn’t logic. For a group of people who claim to hate the supposed redefinition of words when it comes to gender and race; for a group of people who are very mad about the postmodern tendency to say nothing means anything (or at least this is an aspect of postmodernism they seem to have gleaned from their favorite subreddits), the new young reactionaries are remarkably devil-may-care about certain words when they seem to lend credibility and strength to their opinions.

By repeating the magic words, they avoid having to deal with a gruesome fact, one that really doesn’t care about their feelings: that they are just a person on a computer with an opinion, talking to other people on computers with opinions. I don’t know what the future holds for these guys. But I do wish they’d stop playing with their magic wands.

Very good read. Thank you.

[JurisDictum]

I also read that and thought it was good read Poke.

I was a young man mad at elevator gate once. Its because the women involved was a total feminist idenitiarian that seemed oddly entitled to be on the same stage as Dawkins -- despite that she was just a relatively unknown woman that didn't do much.

When Dawkins said "oh please" (more or less) and sarcastically referenced how Muslim women should be more thoughtful about how hard it is for women in the west (getting asked on dates in elevators! oh no). Her response was not "hey that's unfair."

It was like "Oh well -- thank you rich white man for putting me in my place /shutter."

My thought was "who the fuck does this woman thinks she is exactly? Show a little respect for perhaps the biggest name in the movement."

Maybe that was sexist...But I don't think some unknown young man would have received a lot better treatment.

----

It's pretty mainstream now to not like Identitarian bloggers that just trumpet around the female victim card (or whatever else). This also co-insided with Matt Dillahunty really toning it down and the atheist movement realizing they were turning into a bunch of fuckin evangelicals.

The reason I don't blame Islam exclusively for the problems in the middle east is because I had the experience of being an angry atheist and blaming all the problems of America on Christianity.

I still waffle back in forth on how important secularism is. It does seem like it takes a lot of energy out of political sphere and channels it into something largely useless.

[feniin]

I tried several times to get through that piece of garbage wall of text. Stinks of one of those pathetic attempts to sound intelligent to people who don't know jack shit. He even spends a paragraph covering the idiocies of the thoroughly debunked marxist masquerading as an anthropologist, Gould. Like, what is this guy writing in from 1980? Sounds like your typical NPCs copying pasting thoughts/opinion someone gave him.

Oh yeah? Cool.

[DMN]

Oh yeah? Cool.

Orange man bad. I R smart.

[JurisDictum]

I tried several times to get through that piece of garbage wall of text. Stinks of one of those pathetic attempts to sound intelligent to people who don't know jack shit. He even spends a paragraph covering the idiocies of the thoroughly debunked marxist masquerading as an anthropologist, Gould. Like, what is this guy writing in from 1980? Sounds like your typical NPCs copying pasting thoughts/opinion someone gave him.

Alright. Let me try to make this more simple for the Shapiro fans:

Generally when you want your arguments to be effective, you use agreed upon facts to make them. Your conclusion should logically flow from your claims.

Shapiro, for example, says "gay parents aren't as good as straight parents for their children." That's not an agreed upon fact. There some studies that suggest that, others that don't.

"Therefore," Shapiro continues, "gays shouldn't be able to adopt." That doesn't necessarily flow though does it? I mean we don't have all the adoptive parents we need necessarily. And we don't generally insist each adoptive candidate be absolutely perfect.

I'm going to go ahead and guess rich gay parents produce way better outcomes than more humble straight parents statistically. Because rich people always produce better outcomes in their children. Does that mean no middle class straight people can adopt now? Only the rich?

Its an incomplete argument at best for something very important. That's an important question whether or not gays can adopt and he should probably actually develop a complete argument as to why it's a good idea to stop them from adopting.

[Ahldagor]

Alright. Let me try to make this more simple for the Shapiro fans:

Generally when you want your arguments to be effective, you use agreed upon facts to make them. Your conclusion should logically flow from your claims.

Shapiro, for example, says "gay parents aren't as good as straight parents for their children." That's not an agreed upon fact. There some studies that suggest that, others that don't.

"Therefore," Shapiro continues, "gays shouldn't be able to adopt." That doesn't necessarily flow though does it? I mean we don't have all the adoptive parents we need necessarily. And we don't generally insist each adoptive candidate be absolutely perfect.

I'm going to go ahead and guess rich gay parents produce way better outcomes than more humble straight parents statistically. Because rich people always produce better outcomes in their children. Does that mean no middle class straight people can adopt now? Only the rich?

Its an incomplete argument at best for something very important. That's an important question whether or not gays can adopt and he should probably actually develop a complete argument as to why it's a good idea to stop them from adopting.

Dude. Kids are an investment, right on. Zmoke weed e'ryday.

[Wonkie]

speaking of kids, i found a mormon board to LOOK BUT NOT TOUCH at

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/list.php?2

it's pretty active

[Irulan]

Wtf

[JurisDictum]

"Bill Gates has made billions mostly because of patient laws -- that if America had from the beginning -- we would still be exporting fruit and fish."

- Noam Chomsky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7nzyrbWv9E)

Gates want's your money so he can give it to Africa before it dies. Spread the word to your Republican friends.

[Madbad]

speaking of kids, i found a mormon board to LOOK BUT NOT TOUCH at

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/list.php?2

it's pretty active

I'm totally rolling a new forum quest persona there.

[DinoTriz2]

Alright. Let me try to make this more simple for the Shapiro fans:

Generally when you want your arguments to be effective, you use agreed upon facts to make them. Your conclusion should logically flow from your claims.

Shapiro, for example, says "gay parents aren't as good as straight parents for their children." That's not an agreed upon fact. There some studies that suggest that, others that don't.

"Therefore," Shapiro continues, "gays shouldn't be able to adopt." That doesn't necessarily flow though does it? I mean we don't have all the adoptive parents we need necessarily. And we don't generally insist each adoptive candidate be absolutely perfect.

I'm going to go ahead and guess rich gay parents produce way better outcomes than more humble straight parents statistically. Because rich people always produce better outcomes in their children. Does that mean no middle class straight people can adopt now? Only the rich?

Its an incomplete argument at best for something very important. That's an important question whether or not gays can adopt and he should probably actually develop a complete argument as to why it's a good idea to stop them from adopting.

Shapiro is a horrible example for the "intellectual dark web".

Just because he coined "facts don't care about your feelings" doesn't mean he follows his own advice.

Right wingers fall into the same traps and logical fallacies as leftists do.

However, it is undeniable that the Left values emotions and subjective feelings and experiences over cold hard logical facts.

You guys have become so flaky and deluded, that you can't even keep your ideology consistent and on a firm foundation.

It's like a house of cards that's so rickety, an average opponent can poke your arguments and they come crashing down, gaining millions of views, and in the process look like a genius.

Seriously, get help. You're only appealing to the far left homeless in San Francisco.

Everyone else smells your bullshit. :)

[JurisDictum]

Generally when you want your arguments to be effective, you use agreed upon facts to make them. Your conclusion should logically flow from your claims.

[Irulan]

Shapiro is a horrible example for the "intellectual dark web".

Just because he coined "facts don't care about your feelings" doesn't mean he follows his own advice.

Right wingers fall into the same traps and logical fallacies as leftists do.

However, it is undeniable that the Left values emotions and subjective feelings and experiences over cold hard logical facts.

You guys have become so flaky and deluded, that you can't even keep your ideology consistent and on a firm foundation.

It's like a house of cards that's so rickety, an average opponent can poke your arguments and they come crashing down, gaining millions of views, and in the process look like a genius.

Seriously, get help. You're only appealing to the far left homeless in San Francisco.

Everyone else smells your bullshit. :)

Unironic, genuine praise follows.

Trippple AAA post. I am really impressed dawg.

[Irulan]

I don't want affirmative action messing with children's fate.

It should always be legal for gays to adopt, but there should be merit in it.

Not some rule saying X # of children must go to gay parents. Or gay is automatically OK.

Withhold federal funds from douche cults or don't fund adoption federally at all. The latter is probably constitutional.

Go Kickstart the private gay adoption agency and back it with a gay religion for even better results. Call it, "The Rainbow Bridge". Skim from it's coffers or use it as a tax haven, thank me later.

Stop requiring other people to hand over kids in their guardianship to gay ppl.

Also gay people aren't entitled to kids or government assistance in cloning or acquiring them through adoption. If you really fucking want kids go make your own or live with someone who has them and is willing to make you a legal guardian. You can help raise the village too. God knows it is retarded right now.

[Wonkie]

and they come crashing down, gaining millions of views, and in the process look like a genius.


Opinions from Youtube men are not facts.

[DMN]

"Bill Gates has made billions mostly because of patient laws -- that if America had from the beginning -- we would still be exporting fruit and fish."

- Noam Chomsky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7nzyrbWv9E)

Gates want's your money so he can give it to Africa before it dies. Spread the word to your Republican friends.

I don't see how any of this has to do with this thread, but anyway...

Chomsky is a clown who is only notable for his consummate over exaggeration of USA's indiscretions and an equal underreporting of other nations'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds7c3gOf2_I

Did you even follow his idiotic claim of talking to GE/big banks to put the "Jewish lobby" out of business. He might as well be babbling in a padded cell. This dude is so detached from reality, beaming in from his lofty ivoried perch where he spews feel good "america bad" half-truths to his flagellant zombies, no reasonable person can make any sense of him. Also notice how the "brutally honest" propagandist not-so-cleverly changes the subject from "Israeli lobby" to "Jewish lobby". Classic Chumpsky "logic".

And I don't think anyone cares what Gates does with his money unless it's harming the USA in some capacity. No one knows what the world would look like without patent laws. Who would even waste their time with this sort of hypothetical mental masturbation? Oh, oh, I know! I know!

[DinoTriz2]

retarded shit

You people believe there are no objective facts, so I'm not surprised when you hear undeniable truths, you see them as opinion.

Grass is green, most of time.

The sky is blue, most of the time.

Sorry I brought my subjective opinions up.

[Wonkie]

here is a meme let's discuss it

https://i.imgur.com/bGyYGZN.jpg

[DinoTriz2]

here is a meme let's discuss it

https://i.imgur.com/bGyYGZN.jpg

Who thinks this way?

A major reason people do not like overpopulation is because of over consumption.

That's like claiming there are people who love hamburgers but hate hamburger buns.

That person literally does not exist.

[Wonkie]

Who thinks this way?

A major reason people do not like overpopulation is because of over consumption.

That's like claiming there are people who love hamburgers but hate hamburger buns.

That person literally does not exist.

thank you very enlightening

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/jVMjZV8_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/MhckpUj_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/6pzMo6b_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

[Irulan]

If Bill gates doesn't kill the "African Continentals".

We are screwed.

Stat fleet is gonna be weird.

[DinoTriz2]

Bill Gates ate a pizza roll on YouTube

[Irulan]

That's like claiming there are people who love hamburgers but hate hamburger buns.


True. Just like Leftists claiming "not to be racist". Or sexist.

[Irulan]

Bill Gates ate a pizza roll on YouTube

I made a bun, in the oven. With walnuts, cherry, and cinnamon. For my mom. Instead of killing myself.

This is wat America shud be.

[JurisDictum]

I don't see how any of this has to do with this thread, but anyway...

Chomsky is a clown who is only notable for his consummate over exaggeration of USA's indiscretions and an equal underreporting of other nations'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds7c3gOf2_I

Did you even follow his idiotic claim of talking to GE/big banks to put the "Jewish lobby" out of business. He might as well be babbling in a padded cell. This dude is so detached from reality, beaming in from his lofty ivoried perch where he spews feel good "america bad" half-truths to his flagellant zombies, no reasonable person can make any sense of him. Also notice how the "brutally honest" propagandist not-so-cleverly changes the subject from "Israeli lobby" to "Jewish lobby". Classic Chumpsky "logic".

And I don't think anyone cares what Gates does with his money unless it's harming the USA in some capacity. No one knows what the world would look like without patent laws. Who would even waste their time with this sort of hypothetical mental masturbation? Oh, oh, I know! I know!

The Reason the Israel Lobby is powerful is not because a small ethnic group controls US policy in a top-down way. It's powerful other people as well, including white Christian elites and the American public (up until Gen Y). Both feel supportive of Israel. A lot of it can be traced to how little we like Palestinians or Arab groups.

That's all he's saying. Put on a business suit a make a presentation to our weapon producer's abut how their interests aren't being represented. Or how getting rid of Israel makes any sense to them.

It's not like elite Americans haven't heard the idea that Israel is influential on America. It's not like we only do bad things because of Israel. I thought that was fucking obvious. So does he and that's what the chuckles are about.

Patient laws are mechanism of monopoly and limit (or even eliminate) market competition. If your a rightwinger -- you should probably have taken this opportunity to say:

"see AHAH! the government is always behind a monopoly!"

Rather then the dumb shit just said.

Chomsky has written 30 books and been around 5 decades or some shit. You link me 5 min video like it's even possible to completely discredit everything else he ever did with a stupid offhanded comment. Which I don't think it was BTW. I agree with him. How is he wrong?

WTF has Shapiro done? What ideas does he have that are compelling? The guy is TBM.

[DinoTriz2]

I made a bun, in the oven. With walnuts, cherry, and cinnamon. For my mom. Instead of killing myself.

This is wat America shud be.

Damn that sounds amazing.

The bun, not your potential suicide.

[Irulan]

Damn that sounds amazing.

The bun, not your potential suicide.

I am not SJW signaling. I am just reminding myself why I still breath. Not looking for sympathy. Just reminding the kids to make their beds. Cook some delicious pie. Or write someone a nice letter or blink once for another sponge bath.

[Irulan]

And thanks :p

First loaf is real gud. Best texture and crunch yet. A little light on flavor though.

:D

[JurisDictum]

At the risk of undermining my last point:

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-incredible-hypocrisy-of-Jeff-Bezos-580908

Hillary Clinton tried to shift the blame to Trump and the Russians after wasting $1.2 billion on her failed campaign. A divorce may cost Bezos as much as $68 billion and undermine confidence in Amazon and his leadership. Blaming Trump, Russia and the Saudis redeems acts of otherwise unforgivable stupidity. It transforms abusers like Hillary Clinton and Bezos into victims by blaming their folly on a conspiracy.

But if the Saudis did hack Bezos, it would be because his ownership of the Washington Post had put him at the nexus of a shadowy underworld of information operations. The first shot was fired when the Post gave Qatari lobbyist, Jamal Khashoggi, a former terrorist propagandist and old friend of Osama bin Laden, column space. The Qataris, beyond backing Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran, also sought regime change in Saudi Arabia by mobilizing an effort to overthrow its current monarch.

LOL, Bezos...totally Jewed.

[Irulan]

Cinnamon walnut and cherry is confirmed on point :D

[DinoTriz2]

Why do idiots call Starship Trooper fascist propaganda? Everything is fascist, apparently. Even defending yourself from genocidal aliens. (https://youtu.be/95OQlvEQNRM)

[Wonkie]

Why do idiots call Starship Trooper fascist propaganda? Everything is fascist, apparently. Even defending yourself from genocidal aliens. (https://youtu.be/95OQlvEQNRM)

heinlein wouldn't fuck a fascist unless it was underage

[Wonkie]

‘I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed’ (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)

So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.

[JurisDictum]

Why do idiots call Starship Trooper fascist propaganda? Everything is fascist, apparently. Even defending yourself from genocidal aliens. (https://youtu.be/95OQlvEQNRM)

Lol,

Well that's what Skarlorn did for 4 years for his degree. That's why I'm not a big fan of Literature/Humanities degrees. Its like you learn to think for fun but without the part where you determine whether or not your ideas matter worth a shit or are connected to reality.

Maybe this video would make sense if the movie wasn't fucking old as hell and completely unrelated to any kind of outside movement toward fascism.

[JurisDictum]

A reporter on Venezuela not connected to MSM or Neoliberal establishment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq7ngZgzU-k

[DinoTriz2]

‘I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed’ (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)

Putting someone in a jacket does not make them fascist.

[Wonkie]

Putting someone in a jacket does not make them fascist.

you're better off rambling incoherently about heinlein than disagreeing with the movie director about his intent.

hope this helps

[DinoTriz2]

you're better off rambling incoherently about heinlein than disagreeing with the movie director about his intent.

hope this helps

"I put him in a grey jacket! Why won't you guys agree he's a fascist! Gah, dumb conservatardd!!"

That's what you all sound like.

[DinoTriz2]

HOAX Hate Crimes are on the rise, per the FBI, due to Leftists becoming so desperate that they're willing to commit felonies to own the Conservatives (https://youtu.be/i2eBSiv3UB4)

[Wonkie]

"I put him in a grey jacket! Why won't you guys agree he's a fascist! Gah, dumb conservatardd!!"

That's what you all sound like.

are you feeling ok?

take a break and come back when you can hang. its no fun when you're like this :(

[misterbonkers]

Putting someone in a jacket does not make them fascist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

[DMN]

A reporter on Venezuela not connected to MSM or Neoliberal establishment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq7ngZgzU-k

China, Russia, Cuba, N. Korea can't all be wrong, right?

[America]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprophilia

[DinoTriz2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

Yeah, and that's my point.

It's a weak as fuck allegory.

[JurisDictum]

China, Russia, Cuba, N. Korea can't all be wrong, right?

This guy thinks a good idea to trust John Bolton again. Because if there is one thing the American people have been asking for, its more war in 3rd world countries and nation building.

And of course its our right to do it right? We totally have the right to overthrow popular governments and install puppet leaders and this never backfire.

:rolleyes:

[DinoTriz2]

are you feeling ok?

take a break and come back when you can hang. its no fun when you're like this :(

Why do you think I'm being serious?

You see this stable and realistic laugh?

"aHHhaAhAhaHahaHahhah+a+a!"

That's a man that's not serious.

[America]

https://i.imgur.com/pCAkiRu.png

[DMN]

This guy thinks a good idea to trust John Bolton again. Because if there is one thing the American people have been asking for, its more war in 3rd world countries and nation building.

And of course its our right to do it right? We totally have the right to overthrow popular governments and install puppet leaders and this never backfire.

:rolleyes:

Who's a Bolton fan? I actually like to refer to him as Wario. Geopolitically, Venezuela is really quite important for the future. The world is being fought over by China, Russia, and the USA. Who you got?

[JurisDictum]

Who's a Bolton fan? I actually like to refer to him as Wario. Geopolitically, Venezuela is really quite important for the future. The world is being fought over by China, Russia, and the USA. Who you got?

We won't see a dime of that oil money. Not unless you happen to own stock in Citgo. Venezuela can deliver cheap oil to the market without a U.S. based company running it.

But specific people stand to profit from owning the company. This is a typical case of socializing costs (warfare and diplomacy with Venezuela) and privatizing the profits.

[Irulan]

I just want a smart charming wise intellectual logical fascist leader and strategist with a fine appreciation for some girl cock. That'd be awesome.

[Irulan]

theres no such thing as girl cock sorry if you are confused and on hormones for the opposite sex and don't participate in society

Well, you're right, peni aren't really girlish or lady like.

It's just a metaphor bro.

I don't mind if someone thinks my girl cock is amazing.

[DinoTriz2]

Obligatory AIU video (https://youtu.be/b-9OovRtLWw)

[JurisDictum]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/facebook-fake-news-investigation-report-regulation-privacy-law-dcms

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”

Dun dun dun dunnnnn.

Oh and Amazon booked record profits last year but paid nothing in U.S. federal taxes. (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/amazon-puts-the-smile-in-federal-income-taxes-by-not-paying-any/)

and an Infamous War Criminal is in Charge of our Venezuela Coup (https://www.thenation.com/article/an-actual-american-war-criminal-may-become-our-second-ranking-diplomat/)

But don't let me stop you with all that white identity shit and wall talk.

[DMN]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/facebook-fake-news-investigation-report-regulation-privacy-law-dcms



Dun dun dun dunnnnn.

Oh and Amazon booked record profits last year but paid nothing in U.S. federal taxes. (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/amazon-puts-the-smile-in-federal-income-taxes-by-not-paying-any/)

and an Infamous War Criminal is in Charge of our Venezuela Coup (https://www.thenation.com/article/an-actual-american-war-criminal-may-become-our-second-ranking-diplomat/)

But don't let me stop you with all that white identity shit and wall talk.

You might want to stop taking what you are taking. Alternatively, take a whole lot more.

[JurisDictum]

You might want to stop taking what you are taking. Alternatively, take a whole lot more.

A majority don't support the wall.

Think about it. Which one of your beliefs can't be directly traced to cold war propaganda?

Oh yea,

the stuff about Jews controlling everything.

You don't have to be Jewish to corrupt. And you don't have to be on drugs to see what's going down in Venezuela.

It's usually when I stop smoking pot that I'm accused of taking drugs.

[DMN]

A majority don't support the wall.

Think about it. Which one of your beliefs can't be directly traced to cold war propaganda?

Oh yea,

the stuff about Jews controlling everything.

You don't have to be Jewish to corrupt. And you don't have to be on drugs to see what's going down in Venezuela.

It's usually when I stop smoking pot that I'm accused of taking drugs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h9MxNn8P7w

[DinoTriz2]

A majority don't support the wall.

Think about it. Which one of your beliefs can't be directly traced to cold war propaganda?

Oh yea,

the stuff about Jews controlling everything.

You don't have to be Jewish to corrupt. And you don't have to be on drugs to see what's going down in Venezuela.

It's usually when I stop smoking pot that I'm accused of taking drugs.

A majority supports a secure border.

[Mblake81]

But don't let me stop you with all that white identity shit and wall talk.

Pot brownies and gay sex.

[Wonkie]

Obligatory AIU video (https://youtu.be/b-9OovRtLWw)

In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that a lot of New Atheism devolved into reactionary, antifeminist, and even white supremacist thought, because it was never really about the things it claimed to be about. The dominant affect of New Atheism wasn’t humility, or reflexivity, or curiosity, all the things one truly needs to improve intellectually. It was smugness.

[Mblake81]

Join Date: Aug 2014
Posts: 5

No posts since 2014 until today, why do we have the honor?

[Mblake81]

lol

Thanks, I moonlight as a hilarious guy.

[Sonderbeast]

Thanks, I moonlight as a hilarious guy.

grats on your 200th post in 8 years!

[America]

mblake is one of the most memorable and delightful posters. funny how that works ^^

[Sonderbeast]

These last two have been trash

Sad!

[America]

oh hush Sonderbeast; you know where you rank.

[Sonderbeast]

oh hush Sonderbeast; you know where you rank.

There's always a bigger fish

[JurisDictum]

Congress Sells Out Again

After spending the last 10 years debating border security—the last two of which were under unified GOP control—and then engaging in a 35-day shutdown the best Congress could muster this week was a 1,169 page bill that does nothing more than sustain the problem.

The fix was in from the start. Democrats entered negotiations determined not to give an inch to President Trump’s policy priorities, particularly on the wall. They were matched with Republicans who largely agreed with them. Senators Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) made up Team GOP and of those names, the latter are three already on record supporting amnesty. Hoeven, in fact, was the lead sponsor of the Senate’s 2013 Gang of Eight amnesty proposal.

The Democrats, it seems, did not have to put up much of a fight on the wall, or, for that matter, on much else. Funding for 55 miles of fencing was included in the legislation—but paid for with $1.4 billion, less than the $1.6 billion Democrats were originally offering.

The Washington Post made clear the type of hardball Republicans were willing to play:

An emboldened House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), a Pelosi confidante, took a page from her friend’s playbook of driving a tough bargain: She walked into the room and surprised her Senate counterparts by lowering the offer to $1.375 billion.

Shelby accepted without a fight.


Let's talk about FACTS AND LOGIC for a minute here.

Could it be, that there simply is no reason to believe a wall is going to have a notable impact on illegal immigration or crime committed by immigrants?

Any facts or logic at all there besides: "Welp, walls keep people out."

How about the fact that the vast majority of immigrants illegally here didn't cross the boarder illegally? They overstayed their visas or enter based on asylum right? Well be seeing quite a few of them soon from Venezuela I'm guessing -- since we insist on being so fucking involved.

I have a radical idea here. Maybe this is not some globalist conspiracy to end America. Maybe these guys just don't think it matters because all the evidence points to that conclusion.

So Republicans, bare with me now, just pretend to think the wall is a good idea and that their base is correct. This allows them to be popular while they do other stuff they actually care about. Do you really think Mitch -- I married an Asian Immigrant -- McConnell sees eye to eye with his red neck base?

10644

Let's just pretend there is no problem. It's not a big issue for wages, crime, or drugs. None of those things are greatly impacted by additional walls.

What would you populist Republicans focus on next? Maybe you should start coming up with something.

[America]

Let's talk about FACTS AND LOGIC for a minute here.

Could it be, that there simply is no reason to believe a wall is going to have a notable impact on illegal immigration or crime committed by immigrants?

Any facts or logic all there besides "Welp, walls keep people out."

How about the fact that the vast majority of immigrants illegally here didn't cross the boarder illegally? They overstayed their visas or enter based on asylum right? Well be seeing quite a few of them soon from Venezuela I'm guessing -- since we insist on being so fucking involved.

I have a radical idea here. Maybe this is not some globalist conspiracy to end America. Maybe these guys just don't think it matters because all the evidence points to that conclusion.

So Republicans, bare with me now, just pretend to think the wall is a good idea and that their base is correct. This allows them to be popular while they do other stuff they actually care about. Do you really think Mitch -- I married an Asian Immigrant -- McConnell sees eye to eye with his red neck base?

10644

Let's just pretend there is no problem. It's not a big issue for wages, crime, or drugs. None of those things are greatly impacted by walls.

What would you populist Republicans focus on next? Maybe you should start coming up with something.

Now THIS is an aesthetically appealing post. The spacing. The gif. Too bad I didn't read it because it's commie garbage

[Ennewi]

If the wall-fence-barrier ever managed to get built, after being deemed largely ineffective, the next proposal would be...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB4NOlCvr4A

[Mblake81]

What would you populist Republicans focus on next? Maybe you should start coming up with something.

Not a damn thing.

Get up and go to work, does that change?

Brownies and Deviancy.

[Mblake81]

There's always a bigger fish

https://i.imgur.com/lgMsQMW.jpg?1

[DinoTriz2]

Let's talk about FACTS AND LOGIC for a minute here.

Could it be, that there simply is no reason to believe a wall is going to have a notable impact on illegal immigration or crime committed by immigrants?

Any facts or logic at all there besides: "Welp, walls keep people out."

How about the fact that the vast majority of immigrants illegally here didn't cross the boarder illegally? They overstayed their visas or enter based on asylum right?

Jesus, this tired argument again...

1) Overstayed Visas only account for half

2) We can find those who overstay their visas

[DinoTriz2]

In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that a lot of New Atheism devolved into reactionary, antifeminist, and even white supremacist thought, because it was never really about the things it claimed to be about. The dominant affect of New Atheism wasn’t humility, or reflexivity, or curiosity, all the things one truly needs to improve intellectually. It was smugness.

No, these atheists tell you straight up:

The new far left regressives are fundamentalists with a dogmatic ideology that resembles religion.

That's why.

But go ahead and listen to idiots who GUESS why a lot of Atheists have turned on the far left...

[Wonkie]

No, these atheists tell you straight up:

The new far left regressives are fundamentalists with a dogmatic ideology that resembles religion.

That's why.

But go ahead and listen to idiots who GUESS why a lot of Atheists have turned on the far left...

:o

[DinoTriz2]

:o

Today's far left are almost identical to how the religious right acted in the 80s and the 90s.

It's your time to be the puritanical, moral busy-bodies who think of everything in terms of black and white.

The far left acts like a religious cult, who doesn't tolerate dissent or accept nuance.

Sorry you don't realize this.

There are famous Leftists who get death threats because they don't outright claim that they hate Trump.

That's what you guys are now.

[Mblake81]

It was with a strangely deflated feeling in his gut..

Harvard biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi made his way to Cancun for a scientific conference in December. Strange because a major advance had just been made in his field, something that might normally make him happy. Deflated because the advance hadn’t been made by him or by any of his fellow academic researchers. It had been made by a machine.

DeepMind, an AI company that Google bought in 2014, had outperformed all the researchers who’d submitted entries to the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) conference

In his post, AlQuraishi describes the gamut of emotions he experienced at CASP. He discusses his initial melancholy — he felt like he and the other academics had been made obsolete — and how he ultimately overrode that feeling “as my tribal reflexes gave way to a cooler and more rational assessment of the value of scientific progress.” His meditation struck me as important, because if we’re going to solve high-impact problems, we need to find a way to be psychologically open to the notion that our own minds will not always be the best tools.

-Finding the best ways to do good. Made possible by The Rockefeller Foundation

Nixed commentary, who cares :o

[Wonkie]

Today's far left are almost identical to how the religious right acted in the 80s and the 90s.

It's your time to be the puritanical, moral busy-bodies who think of everything in terms of black and white.

The far left acts like a religious cult, who doesn't tolerate dissent or accept nuance.

Sorry you don't realize this.

There are famous Leftists who get death threats because they don't outright claim that they hate Trump.

That's what you guys are now.

*dog pets dog*

[Wonkie]

https://i.imgur.com/8GeIlf4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/wBq1ClB.jpg

[DinoTriz2]

*dog pets dog*

https://imgur.com/zha207h.gif

[DinoTriz2]

https://i.imgur.com/8GeIlf4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/wBq1ClB.jpg

What kind of gotcha is this?

Tim is absolutely correct.

Remember what I said about the far left not accepting nuance?

[Wonkie]

What kind of gotcha is this?

Tim is absolutely correct.

Remember what I said about the far left not accepting nuance?

it means you're a fool if you believe Tim Pools claim of being a leftist.

my dear audience

[DinoTriz2]

it means you're a fool if you believe Tim Pools claim of being a leftist.

my dear audience

He IS a Leftist.

He openly disapproves of Trump and talks about he'd rather have Bernie in just about every video.

He focuses on the mainstream media's screw ups, and encourages deeper fact-finding methods within journalism.

So when the media fucks up and prints fake news stories about Trump, he covers it.

Let me know when you find a video of him praising Trump.

I won't hold my breath because you won't find it.

[Wonkie]

He IS a Leftist.

He openly disapproves of Trump and talks about he'd rather have Bernie in just about every video.

He focuses on the mainstream media's screw ups, and encourages deeper fact-finding methods within journalism.

So when the media fucks up and prints fake news stories about Trump, he covers it.

Let me know when you find a video of him praising Trump.

I won't hold my breath because you won't find it.

i wish you would

[DinoTriz2]

i wish you would

Why?

Because I pokesan a hole in every argument you attempt?

[Wonkie]

Why?

Because I pokesan a hole in every argument you attempt?

no i just think you're a twerp