Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

  On 6/4/2020 at 10:03 PM, joshuatxuk said:

I'm aware of it. There's rampant claims of antisemitism toward leftists in Europe (like Germany's Antideutsch movement) but it's just a completely different beast in the US especially in terms of the weird US evangelical and Israel lobby synergy. I can't think of any Christian megachurches in the UK that have replicas of Holy Land sites

 

It's sad really. Anti-zionism isn't antisemitism.

  On 6/4/2020 at 9:56 PM, sweepstakes said:

You're not wrong about any of that. I just think by having this data we can say, hey, look, if we keep doing what we're doing, it suuuure looks like we're fucked. And if that gets ignored, you can point back to that and say, welp, you could have listened. Hopefully before it's too late.

TL;DR you're totally right and I'm in the "bargaining" stage of grief over how fucked we are.

agreed 100% of course that more data is great. i'm just more realistic about things and would say to take that data and look for the points of hope, the points we can lean into and bend the country towards. (and the article you linked is interesting actually now that i've read it, there is definitely a place for that in the economic areas, interesting stuff!) ...i think there's opportunity there to change some minds: when you can back up anecdotes and experiences with some hard data, i think there are some who will be swayed, at least partly. i say that because now we're seeing a fair amount of people who not being able to deny issues like unfair treatment of POC by police, obviously with more video evidence constantly (sadly) being poured out onto the web...and now that journalists and academia is starting to more seriously try and quantify some of these issues, there is more data stacking up, slowly. 

despite how i might sound sometimes in moments i don't think the country is fucked. i realize that the country as a whole, in general, is better for basically everyone right now than at any time in its past. obviously it is not on par on many points with other countries now or even in their pasts perhaps, but in America 2020 is better for the most part than it was in 2000, and it was better than 1980, and so forth. things are generally trending towards more fairness and acceptance. we're pushing harder at the edges tho, and the edges are starting to get to a tipping point where little changes won't really do a damned thing...big changes must happen in order for anything to change now. you can't just fire a couple of cops...everyone realizes that isn't going to stop anything. you fire one cop here, and another kills another black person in some other city for no reason. it's systemic. you have to reform the entire approach to policing in order to fix the problem, and no one can deny that anymore (even if they are on Facebook or when they talk to their families, more and more they know this shit is wrong in their hearts...they just don't care/want it stay that way. because they're racist assholes who fear a world where they and their children are not privileged just by their whiteness). (the systemic aspects of the issues related to police is tied to and also a good analog re: edges/tipping point with the economic issues...we eventually will need systemic tax/economic reforms)

sorry for the tangent there. was gonna delete it but it's just a wall of text most people won't read anyway so 

  On 6/5/2020 at 2:02 AM, auxien said:

agreed 100% of course that more data is great. i'm just more realistic about things and would say to take that data and look for the points of hope, the points we can lean into and bend the country towards. (and the article you linked is interesting actually now that i've read it, there is definitely a place for that in the economic areas, interesting stuff!) ...i think there's opportunity there to change some minds: when you can back up anecdotes and experiences with some hard data, i think there are some who will be swayed, at least partly. i say that because now we're seeing a fair amount of people who not being able to deny issues like unfair treatment of POC by police, obviously with more video evidence constantly (sadly) being poured out onto the web...and now that journalists and academia is starting to more seriously try and quantify some of these issues, there is more data stacking up, slowly. 

despite how i might sound sometimes in moments i don't think the country is fucked. i realize that the country as a whole, in general, is better for basically everyone right now than at any time in its past. obviously it is not on par on many points with other countries now or even in their pasts perhaps, but in America 2020 is better for the most part than it was in 2000, and it was better than 1980, and so forth. things are generally trending towards more fairness and acceptance. we're pushing harder at the edges tho, and the edges are starting to get to a tipping point where little changes won't really do a damned thing...big changes must happen in order for anything to change now. you can't just fire a couple of cops...everyone realizes that isn't going to stop anything. you fire one cop here, and another kills another black person in some other city for no reason. it's systemic. you have to reform the entire approach to policing in order to fix the problem, and no one can deny that anymore (even if they are on Facebook or when they talk to their families, more and more they know this shit is wrong in their hearts...they just don't care/want it stay that way. because they're racist assholes who fear a world where they and their children are not privileged just by their whiteness). 

sorry for the tangent there. was gonna delete it but it's just a wall of text most people won't read anyway so 

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Deep down, I don't think we are fucked either. It looks really shitty right now, but hopefully we're just in a "worse before it gets better" phase. I think the last 4 years have been really eye-opening.

I'm not gonna lie, though, I get really disheartened when I go to fivethirtyeight and see that approval rating - it's trending downward now, but way slower than it should. Of course you can't reduce the fuckedness of the country to a number.

I've been thinking a lot (along with, like, everyone else) over the last, well, 10+ years, about how badly American capitalism has been failing the vast majority of the population. I've started to see things like crowd-funding as a form of sort of "socialist emulation" - building a more equitable system within the existing horribly broken one, or alongside it (sorry, I know that is kind of cheesy and naive but I hope you see what I'm getting at). I agree that big changes must happen - will happen, it's just a matter of how long the status quo charade is allowed to sustain. But the think that's abundantly clear now is that those changes are not going to come from our purported leaders, or at least that they are going to put them off as long as they possibly can. So we have to find a way to incrementally build something better until the parts that are irreperably broken are no longer an existential threat or a chilling effect. But I really have no idea what this looks like, only my own privileged daydreams, really.

  On 6/4/2020 at 11:31 PM, Nebraska said:

 

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  On 6/5/2020 at 2:21 AM, sweepstakes said:

Deep down, I don't think we are fucked either. It looks really shitty right now, but hopefully we're just in a "worse before it gets better" phase. I think the last 4 years have been really eye-opening.

I'm not gonna lie, though, I get really disheartened when I go to fivethirtyeight and see that approval rating - it's trending downward now, but way slower than it should. Of course you can't reduce the fuckedness of the country to a number.

I've been thinking a lot (along with, like, everyone else) over the last, well, 10+ years, about how badly American capitalism has been failing the vast majority of the population. I've started to see things like crowd-funding as a form of sort of "socialist emulation" - building a more equitable system within the existing horribly broken one, or alongside it (sorry, I know that is kind of cheesy and naive but I hope you see what I'm getting at). I agree that big changes must happen - will happen, it's just a matter of how long the status quo charade is allowed to sustain. But the think that's abundantly clear now is that those changes are not going to come from our purported leaders, or at least that they are going to put them off as long as they possibly can. So we have to find a way to incrementally build something better until the parts that are irreperably broken are no longer an existential threat or a chilling effect. But I really have no idea what this looks like, only my own privileged daydreams, really.

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i've been thinking about the boat thought experiment (called the Ship of Theseus thought experiment actually which i dont think i knew it was called until i just googled about it) regarding the economic future...

thinking out loud here. feel free to ignore everyone

  On 6/5/2020 at 3:54 AM, auxien said:

i've been thinking about the boat thought experiment (called the Ship of Theseus thought experiment actually which i dont think i knew it was called until i just googled about it) regarding the economic future...

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slowly replacing the welfare services clusterfuck with just pure cash (which in my understanding all the data shows as better all around) and also slowly replacing the totally fucked stock market from the edges inward (will admit that 'replacing the stock market' isn't possible, but the fringe stuff could be sniped i think), slowly reforming the tax codes, slowly upping the minimum wage, slowly moving towards socializing/utilitizing various services like healthcare, internet access, etc., creating permanent volunteer-style 'jobs' programs for those in transitionary periods, schools, homeless, etc., all sorts of stuff but by slowly adding and replacing all these things would the US economy really stay the US economy? that circles back to what i was saying before about 'would America still be America' sorta thinking, and i think that's sorta the only possible course of righting the ship (came back to the initial metaphor)...slowly replacing it bit by bit. big 'Obamacare' type pushes maybe cause too much conflict and end up terribly weak in practice, but smaller chipping away might be much much much better for strategy....and of course that's basically how America is designed to work, slow, incremental changes at local and then larger levels, laws slightly amended here and there, etc., but approaching it like this as a long term strategy could be better in practice. Warren was talking about this iirc with her healthcare plan....transitioning over ten+ years to universal healthcare. but i think maybe the messaging is wrong there: instead of announcing 'we want free universal healthcare to take down all private businesses in that sector permanently' instead just saying, here's the 5 year plan (which of course leads towards that) and then glossing over the result and skirting around that...so the conversation and the focus stays on making changes now to reigning in the healthcare companies, slowly regulating and normalizing their practices one by one until 5 years from now going 'see, this worked well, we learned some things, and now the plan is to remove private healthcare since they're all basically the same anyway' ....part of me of course doesn't like hiding the goal but i'm starting to think that may be the only way to sneak some of this shit through. prove it works in the small ways then you can slowly ramp up your sales pitch to the public. 

thinking out loud here. feel free to ignore everyone

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Wow, thanks for mentioning that. I had not heard of this thought experiment before, but apparently this is the origin of the "different man, different river" proverb? I really like this idea.

  On 6/5/2020 at 6:58 AM, Nebraska said:

 

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Does this happen often? Because if not, holy shit, God is like

Oi caze stop facepalm reacting to my posts and tell me what's wrong you neek.

Trump's going to buy one of those things you guys, everything is fine.

Also this gem.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/918373/white-house-now-surrounded-by-nearly-2-miles-fencing-barricades

How's he going to get out of the fencing?

^has to keep the scary libs away. Trump is such a little bitch.

@Gocab if memory serves, Tony Soprano joked about wives being transported in trailers behind cars to Dr Milfi

His "random bunker inspection" excuse a few days ago reminded me of that Costa Concordia cruise liner captain who claimed he accidentally fell into a lifeboat when the Italian coast guard started chewing him out

  On 6/5/2020 at 7:57 AM, sweepstakes said:

Does this happen often? Because if not, holy shit, God is like

 

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wiki lightning density page shows DC area with 10 - 15 strikes/km²/yr 

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NASA/GHRC/NSSTC Lightning Team - http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0621lightning_prt.htm http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2264
Data from space-based sensors reveal the uneven distribution of worldwide lightning strikes. Units: flashes/km2/yr. Data obtained from April 1995 to February 2003 from NASA's Optical Transient Detector and from January 1998 to February 2003 from NASA's Lightning Imaging Sensor.

  On 6/5/2020 at 7:00 PM, chenGOD said:

https://theweek.com/speedreads/918373/white-house-now-surrounded-by-nearly-2-miles-fencing-barricades

How's he going to get out of the fencing?

Not sure about that, but I hope Mexico is going to pay for his wall/fence.

  On 6/5/2020 at 7:08 PM, joshuatxuk said:

His "random bunker inspection" excuse a few days ago reminded me of that Costa Concordia cruise liner captain who claimed he accidentally fell into a lifeboat when the Italian coast guard started chewing him out

It'd be a real shame if he was seriously injured during a random inspection, especially if involved a ruptured testicle, or say his Twitter thumb was somehow broken

  On 6/5/2020 at 6:28 PM, milkface said:

Oi caze stop facepalm reacting to my posts and tell me what's wrong you neek.

Corbyn was never smeared, he was in fact a massive cunt and a shit politician. Antisemitism in the labour party, and the far-left in general, is a very real thing, and doesn't simply amount to labeling all criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

https://audioboom.com/posts/7480572-labour-s-institutional-antisemitism-crisis

trump did 100 tweets/retweets in an hour today already

  On 6/5/2020 at 7:41 PM, ignatius said:

trump did 100 tweets/retweets in an hour today already

i think we should add 'influencer' to his ever expanding resume of talents

wow. this is some next level spin doctoring. absolutely no shame from donald. just another great, great day in American history.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/05/trump-may-unemployment-numbers-302963

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Speaking from the White House Rose Garden in a previously unannounced news conference, Trump touted Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing the unemployment rate had dropped to 13.3 percent in May as the “greatest comeback in American history.”

But the president took his promotion of the jobs numbers a step further, describing them as a “tremendous tribute to equality” and, in an extraordinary moment, declaring the data marked a “great day” for George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man whose killing by a Minneapolis police officer has ignited protests across all 50 states.

“We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now, and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country,’” Trump said. “This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.”

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  On 6/5/2020 at 7:16 PM, goDel said:

Not sure about that, but I hope Mexico is going to pay for his wall/fence.

he'll use all the leftover cash Mexico gave him from the great wall build for his fence

finally. looks like trumps ass kisser being outted

Well, that would certainly explain why Lady G went from never-Trump to pro-Trump. If you know stuff about Lady G, she will dance for you in every possible way.

Interested to see if she's moving back to her older more critical self