2012 presidential debates

it is a waste of time yet you have no problem writing out generalized statements about the nature of humanity and the universe, how simple the answers are, and then say you don't have enough time to explain these simple answers.

if they are simple, they are explained simply.

Are these the Watmm 2012 Cosmological debates?

ugh, fuck no. i would have an aneurysm.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:13 PM, goDel said:

Are these the Watmm 2012 Cosmological debates?

yes

We could limit the amount of characters per post to 144, if that helps.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:15 PM, Redruth said:

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:13 PM, goDel said:

Are these the Watmm 2012 Cosmological debates?

 

yes

no. in order to have a debate you must first have an idea to present.

Let us unite in these moments of love

I'm glad you've thought about the subject so much (@troon). You're right that we would need much time to discuss the subject of power IRL in order to get anywhere substantial, but let me offer one succinct counterpoint to your interpretation of Power in the natural world. You say we should not blindly accept the existence of Power in nature, and I agree; you go on to say that we should move in the opposite direction from such natural circumstances, and here is where I can no longer agree. How can we move away from something as integrated and necessary for life as the exercise of power? Life simply would not have arisen without dominating and dominated forces. It is fundamental to the nature of life on Earth that the various forms of animate life compete with one another. We - humans - may attempt to overcome this, but the rest of the Universe cannot. We will always live in a Universe full of dominating, and dominated, forces and faces. We can attempt to withdraw from the spectacle as a species, but we cannot take the other species with us. Life can cooperate, but ultimately only to dominate some other facet of existence.

I'm all for the 'evolution' of the human species toward a more peaceful, sustainable world. I am doubtful of the reality of my own wishes, that's all. I can guarantee you that your time would not be wasted on me, so if you wish to talk and spread your message, feel free to carry on with it in PM. I will listen. If you would rather not, then fair enough. I do not have your message; do not expect me to adhere to what I do not know.

POLITICS:

IJDGAF

It must be sad inside to be as cynical and jaded as some people seem to be.

YEAAAAHHHHHHHSJHHHaaaaaa

Sorry to you dudes who just want to talk about the Presidential debates, btw. You're free to carry on instead of involve yourself in the cosmological shit that troon and I have gotten into, hope you know that, lol. I'm not attempting to derail this thread, and I'll be outta here soon. Then the pundits can have the floor again.

BTW, godel, if you disagree with anything I'm saying, feel free to tell me instead of just implying that everything I say is clouded in smoke. Personal attacks won't shut me up, but logic will!

More power to the pundits!

O the irony...

Political pundits. The cosmological pundits currently hold the floor. Please hold your comments until the end.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:26 PM, luke viia said:

BTW, godel, if you disagree with anything I'm saying, feel free to tell me instead of just implying that everything I say is clouded in smoke. Personal attacks won't shut me up, but logic will!

No personal attacks here. No disagreement, or agreement. All logic is out the window.

Fair enough. I tried to stick to saying things that weren't terribly far out, but I got a giant joint jpeg anyway. Since I didn't watch any presidential debates and probably won't watch the upcoming ones, I'll just dip out now. Hopefully troon messages me.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:42 PM, luke viia said:

I'll just dip out now. Hopefully troon touches me.

*fixt*

The spliff was just as much for troon as it was for you or anyone else making posts with more the 144 chars.

lol, right, so most of us in this thread.

srs Q: Does anyone in this thread actually think the presidential debates are doing their job at informing undecided voters of the candidates policies? If not, why are you personally watching the debates?

Most people I know watch the debates to strengthen their opinions of their chosen candidate and laugh at the other. As for the uninformed, most of the uninformed I know choose to be that way, and won't bother watching anyway.

Yeah, well I'm not really adding to the discussion. The debate was just an awful letdown. So I'll rather smoke a spliff and wait for the Rumble.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:50 PM, luke viia said:

lol, right, so most of us in this thread.

 

srs Q: Does anyone in this thread actually think the presidential debates are doing their job at informing undecided voters of the candidates policies? If not, why are you personally watching the debates?

I think this was answered adequately earlier. It does a horrible/non-existent job of providing relative, reliable information.

Why watch it then? The same reasons people listen and analyze old Goebbels propaganda broadcasts, or the same reason actors analyze the movement of the character they seek to emulate/understand. It is because we take interest in the human concept of it all, the display and supposedly careful practice behind the scenes before the actors take the stage.

In other words, presidential debates are incredibly informative, but not in the ways we all expect them to be on the surface.

That's a good answer. I suppose it's good to see what the parties & media are trying to peddle to us, but I feel like I become more misinformed when I watch debates like that, focusing on their promises and words instead of their actions (so I don't watch, similar to not watching Survivor or whatever - they're selling me a version of the story that I think takes me further from reality than I already am).

Going straight to the Presidential hopefuls for their plans of how to fix the nation is similar to asking a potential job employee what they plan on doing for your business. They give you hot air, because you - as the employer - want to hear how great things will be when you hire them. It's a very rare employee indeed who actually lives up to the things they say when they're looking for employment. In fact, jobseekers are encouraged to exaggerate their abilities in interviews, and taught how to get really good at it - so why expect anything different from the candidates? They have entire national teams to help them get the job, and to lie about the other guy's abilities or history. Nothing closely resembling the real ideas in their minds can be brought out this way. As was suggested earlier in the thread, the only debate I'd be interested in is one with automatic fact checkers. Oh how sweet it would be.

  On 10/6/2012 at 8:58 PM, Sprigg said:

Most people I know watch the debates to strengthen their opinions of their chosen candidate and laugh at the other. As for the uninformed, most of the uninformed I know choose to be that way, and won't bother watching anyway.

Yeah, I see your point. Though I said undecided, not uninformed. The suggestion inherent in my question was that if you're undecided about who to vote for, the debates are one of the worst ways to get reliable information from the candidates. The debates are primarily there for partisan voters who already know their answer to what they think are the most pressing problems in America.

What I keep hearing is that Romney just harped on about creating jobs. What a stupid promise. The availability of the current jobs we know and hate are going away, technology is replacing them. As it should. Factory-, blue-collar-, and service jobs can be done more safely and efficiently by machines, and humans rarely enjoy them anyway. Yet I highly doubt that Mitt Romney is thinking about a new kind of job market for Americans; he is trying to patch up the old one. It can't work, and it depresses me to think that people buy the idea that it can.

This whole thing is a bullshit cavalcade of epic proportions. Matt Taibbi sums it up pretty well (pre-debate):

http://www.rollingst...-close-20120925

  Quote

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

 

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.

 

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

i like Matt Tabbi better when he's not trying to be funny, for some reason i find his sense of humor extremely unfunny. I appreciate the information he writes about most of the time, but humorist he is not

  On 10/6/2012 at 6:41 AM, Kanakori said:

Troon is better than you, he keeps us updated on new releases that happen to be always be featured on the front page of Boomkat.com

back to the presidential debate instead of high-school level existentialism

thought this was amusing, i havent talked to anybody yet who didn't think Romney won the debate.