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United States43505 Posts
On September 20 2016 23:06 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 22:35 Plansix wrote:
Let us force our children to pledge allegiance to the Republic and stand during for a song that has the word “the land of the free” in the finally. The home of the brave, where our greatest fear is our children will have different ideals that we do. What the fuck, does that seriously happen? Maybe it is my countries history, but i would be majorly freaked out if school children would be required to participate in some daily propaganda ritual.
Nope, it seems fascist as fuck to the rest of us, not just to the Germans. But at least it'll stop Kremlin Joe from undermining the hearts of our soldiers in the fight against communism.
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Does anyone expect any of the other Bushs to publicly vote for Clinton? Anyone else surprised Romney still hasn't endorsed anyone? It seemed like he was waiting for Johnson to shine. Turns out Johnson is a complete mess (like every single libertarian candidate in history), so that got flushed down the toilet. It is actually interesting to me just how remarkably shitty 3rd party candidates always manage to be. They've got the twitter, reddit AMAs and all that shit, but they just massively shit the bed in a few distinct ways every election.
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On September 20 2016 23:06 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 22:35 Plansix wrote:
Let us force our children to pledge allegiance to the Republic and stand during for a song that has the word “the land of the free” in the finally. The home of the brave, where our greatest fear is our children will have different ideals that we do. What the fuck, does that seriously happen? Maybe it is my countries history, but i would be majorly freaked out if school children would be required to participate in some daily propaganda ritual.
American patriotism has always had a serious fascist undertone.
Be it the pledge or someone not standing during the national anthem.
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On September 20 2016 23:25 Mohdoo wrote:
Does anyone expect any of the other Bushs to publicly vote for Clinton? Anyone else surprised Romney still hasn't endorsed anyone? It seemed like he was waiting for Johnson to shine. Turns out Johnson is a complete mess (like every single libertarian candidate in history), so that got flushed down the toilet. It is actually interesting to me just how remarkably shitty 3rd party candidates always manage to be. They've got the twitter, reddit AMAs and all that shit, but they just massively shit the bed in a few distinct ways every election.
They appeal to the super crazy because no one else does (for good reason). They cant appeal to normal people because they are already taken by the R and D.
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On September 20 2016 23:23 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 22:06 Dan HH wrote:Candy maker Skittles was left sour Monday after being pulled into the mire of the 2016 presidential race by Donald Trump Jr.
The Republican presidential nominee's son tweeted an image Monday that used the popular rainbow-colored candy to make a policy argument against admitting refugees into the United States.
"If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful," the image read. Trump added his own commentary on the message, tweeting, "This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016."
Skittles parent company Wrigley Americas distanced itself from the tweet with a terse response opposing Trump Jr.'s premise.
"Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy," Vice President of Corporate Affairs Denise Young said in the statement. "We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing." http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/skittles-donald-trump-jr-tweet-skittles-are-candy-refugees-are-n651051This truly is a special electoral campagin The skittles facebook forward is about a year old now and generally gets used for Syrian refugees. It's pretty incredible that we are having actual political discussions regarding the content of /r/forwardsfromgrandma. 2016 is the year the internet memes take over. Seize the rarest of Pepes for they will be currency in the new era.
And the internet lords all claim: “Nah, it was just a joke. Why do these old people think these memes are serious? Don’t they understand?” Not fully understanding that the real world does not function on the detached irony that the internet does. The struggle that their sort of detached “counter culture” where nothing is real and everyone is joking has gone main stream and is super real now.
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On September 20 2016 23:25 Mohdoo wrote:
Does anyone expect any of the other Bushs to publicly vote for Clinton? Anyone else surprised Romney still hasn't endorsed anyone? It seemed like he was waiting for Johnson to shine. Turns out Johnson is a complete mess (like every single libertarian candidate in history), so that got flushed down the toilet. It is actually interesting to me just how remarkably shitty 3rd party candidates always manage to be. They've got the twitter, reddit AMAs and all that shit, but they just massively shit the bed in a few distinct ways every election.
If Weld was top of the ticket I could have seen a Romney endorsement. Johnson is too much of a tire fire (at least he's not a dumpster fire) for Romney to endorse though.
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On September 20 2016 23:17 JinDesu wrote:Show nested quote +
House Bill 1750, sponsored by Shane Roden (R- Cedar Hill), specifies publicly funded schools in Missouri must recite the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a day. The previous Missouri requirement was to only say the Pledge once a week.
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Though publicly funded schools will be required to have time to recite the pledge every day, students will not be required to say it. Flags may be provided by voluntary donation and must be in every classroom.
I'm confused - the law is requiring that the school says the pledge, correct? Not that the students must recite it? So they take time out of the day for the school to recite it over intercom, correct?
Yes, legally forcing students to recite it is not in the realm of possibility. From the article as you see, the bill requires schools to do it once a day rather than the previous once a week, and to have a flag in every classroom. I can't check the details, the house site times out on me. Should be here
http://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills161/billpdf/intro/HB1750I.PDF
http://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills161/sumpdf/HB1750C.pdf
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I'm wondering if the Bush's are running a double bluff. They are not popular with anyone let alone the conservatives. I'd say it's benificial to trump more then the politician formerly known as the hilldog.
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I'd always put my hand over my heart, but actually saying a pledge aloud always felt a little...excessive when I was a kid.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gave at least $45,000 to the campaign of Alan Hevesi, a New York state comptroller who later went to prison for his role in a pay-to-play bribery scandal, according to a Huffington Post review of campaign finance records.
Trump’s donations coincided with a $500 million lawsuit he filed against the city of New York in the hopes of reducing his property taxes. As the city comptroller and later the state comptroller, Hevesi, a Democrat, played a role in evaluating and settling legal claims against the city of New York and its officials.
The bulk of Trump’s donations went to Hevesi’s campaign for state comptroller, a race Hevesi won in the fall of 2002. In the fall of 2003, by which point Trump had given Hevesi $35,000, the city settled Trump’s lawsuit, a decision that would have involved both the state comptroller ― i.e., Hevesi ― and the new city comptroller.
The city reduced the tax assessment for Trump’s newest building by 17 percent and awarded the building a special tax abatement. In exchange, Trump agreed to subsidize 200 units of affordable housing in the Bronx. The settlement saved Trump $97 million in taxes he didn’t have to pay, he later wrote in Trump: How To Get Rich.
Trump had donated small amounts to Hevesi during the course of Hevesi’s decades-long career as an assemblyman and a comptroller. But the tens of thousands of dollars Trump gave between July 2002 and January 2004 had no precedent, and no postscript. According to finance records, after 2004, Trump never gave to Hevesi again.
During that same time, Hevesi began accepting bribes from a California businessman, Elliott Broidy, in exchange for steering state money to Broidy’s financial management firm. Hevesi and Broidy both eventually pleaded guilty to felonies in the ensuing corruption scandal.
Broidy is now a major fundraiser for Trump’s presidential campaign. He’s also the vice chairman of Trump’s joint fundraising effort with the Republican National Committee, called Trump Victory. During the time he was bribing Hevesi to steer him business, Broidy and his wife donated at least $126,800 to Hevesi’s campaign war chest, more than double what Trump gave.
The donations were uncovered by the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, a super PAC supporting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
There’s no evidence the contributions to Hevesi were bribes, or that anything untoward happened. But using his political donations to exercise influence over city and state governments has long been part of the way Trump does business. All told, Trump’s 15 core building developments in New York have benefited from an estimated $885 million in tax breaks and subsidies since the late 1980s.
Source
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On September 20 2016 23:47 Sermokala wrote:
I'm wondering if the Bush's are running a double bluff. They are not popular with anyone let alone the conservatives. I'd say it's benificial to trump more then the politician formerly known as the hilldog.
Of course it's not a bluff. The Clintons and Bushes have been close for a long time (I'm not sure whether it started during Clinton's presidency or W's). And their policies really aren't too dissimilar. As for whether the endorsement is beneficial for Clinton, that's less clear.
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United States43505 Posts
On September 20 2016 23:47 Sermokala wrote:
I'm wondering if the Bush's are running a double bluff. They are not popular with anyone let alone the conservatives. I'd say it's benificial to trump more then the politician formerly known as the hilldog.
The Bush family just knows how the world works. At the end of the Second World War the United States set up a hegemonic global aegis to guarantee the freedom of the oceans, world peace (in a broad sense), markets for US goods, secure sources of raw materials for the US and the promotion of western interests. And it has been colossally successful for all parties involved. The last 70 years have been the best 70 years in the history of mankind. Trump's ignorance represents a genuine threat to all of that because he has become so accustomed to the normalcy of it that he no longer sees any value in the foundations. It's coming from the same stupidity as his opposition to the EPA. The air is breathable therefore the EPA is worthless.
For whatever other flaws the Bush family had they were at the least dedicated to maintaining America as the global superpower. Trump explicitly plans to roll all that up and go home, returning the United States to the isolationism of the 1930s. It's geopolitical heresy.
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Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems
Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.
Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.
In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.
In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.
The check to charity from the Trump Foundation.
In another case, court papers say one of Trump’s golf courses in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Trump Foundation, according to tax records.
The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation’s money for a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser.
Source
Oops. Wonder if Dodgy Donald regrets revoking the WaPo's press credentials so they could spend time investigating him.
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On September 20 2016 23:27 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 23:06 Simberto wrote:On September 20 2016 22:35 Plansix wrote:
Let us force our children to pledge allegiance to the Republic and stand during for a song that has the word “the land of the free” in the finally. The home of the brave, where our greatest fear is our children will have different ideals that we do. What the fuck, does that seriously happen? Maybe it is my countries history, but i would be majorly freaked out if school children would be required to participate in some daily propaganda ritual. American patriotism has always had a serious fascist undertone. Be it the pledge or someone not standing during the national anthem.
I really don't think indoctrination of children through this kind of attitude is any better than having, for example, having a state controlled media that makes the people like their leader more than he should maybe be credited for. Combine that with all the wars they start, their imperialistic nature in terms of securing natural resources for themselves, the never-ending police brutality and the just-short-of-enslavement of their prison population, the corporate ownership (through lobbies and donations) of their political players, and so forth... This is why I say they are just as good or bad as the Russians and why I think it would be a good idea for Europe to take a step back and see what we have gotten ourselves into after the Cold War ended.
But no, as soon as you start anywhere from a more neutral point of view, its "but the Americans are our allies!" and we must forgive them for their endless list of transgressions while when the Russians do something bad we must all condemn them for it and don't you dare step out of line. It's a little frustrating. Honestly, at this point, I'm not even sure who are the worst terrorists in the Middle East: the Americans who have been basically attacking the place in one way or another for the past 60 years or the native extremists who are finally fed up with them. I mean, how come people are surprised when a large amount of the population in the Middle East condones violence against the west? After suffering through 60 years of brutality, I'd probably be for some counter-violence too. And you can blame the brutality on the local leaders being shitbags if you like, but I'm betting that's not how the people there see it, because they know their local leaders in both good and bad, while they only know the Americans from their missiles and drones and whatnot. Besides, how many of the shitbag leaders were installed by American powers who wanted to make some deals regarding energy supplies?
Europe has certainly not been innocent in this either, and I know there's an assumption that "when you are the single biggest power you are going to do this" but maybe that's why it'd be good to have multiple large powers (US, EU, SEA, Russia, China, or something) rather than the "lets align ourselves with the biggest jerks on the international stage who are doing everything they can to stay the biggest power so they don't bully us quite as much".
Fucking indoctrination of children gets me all riled up. I mean that really makes me feel sick. In a way, the patriotism is even worse than the religious aspect of the indoctrination, although they line up quite well, I'd imagine, and both work well towards the goal of maintaining the order that they want to see so badly. I'm going to regret posting this, I think, kek.
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A lot of figures from both sides haven't been afraid to acknowledge their support for the Democratic candidate who is going to maintain the status quo and continue terrible and unpopular policies that are by and large in conflict with what people want.
They are, however, remarkably incapable of acknowledging that they themselves aren't generally liked and that their support isn't a net positive.
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On September 20 2016 23:27 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 23:06 Simberto wrote:On September 20 2016 22:35 Plansix wrote:
Let us force our children to pledge allegiance to the Republic and stand during for a song that has the word “the land of the free” in the finally. The home of the brave, where our greatest fear is our children will have different ideals that we do. What the fuck, does that seriously happen? Maybe it is my countries history, but i would be majorly freaked out if school children would be required to participate in some daily propaganda ritual. American patriotism has always had a serious fascist undertone. Be it the pledge or someone not standing during the national anthem.
Nothing wrong with the pledge. I pledged to the flag every school day for 8 years, never had an issue with it.
You can say it's fascism if you want, my interpretation is that I'm living in a country which protects fundamentally important values. A country is basically a group of people living together with common values, they will work together to protect those values. Shit on the USA all you want (and for sure, there are lots of good reasons to criticize the USA), it's still a far cry better than China, Russia, African countries, etc. You think pledging to the flag every morning is fascism? Quite rich coming from someone who has never lived in an actual fascist regime to begin with..
Compare it to France where everyone hates the French, including the French themselves, everyone here is just looking out for number 1. Never mind history, never mind the soldiers who died in the World Wars, never mind that France has done immense work in the area of social equality. People in France aren't going to thank France (generic term regrouping all French people working together to protect national interests) for what it's done for them, they're going to spit at France's face for not giving them enough welfare. http://anonhq.com/violent-protests-labor-strikes-halt-france-hollande-attempts-slay-workers-rights-investigative/
Honestly, if I had to compare disgraceful riots with something as trivial as saying "I pledge allegiance to the group of people with whom I share common values and live with every day", I'd say I'd rather say good morning to the damn flag every day. That's what patriotism is, it's not as empty as people (read Europeans mostly) make it out to be.
Pledging allegiance to a flag every morning does not mean that you're condoning drone strikes in the Middle East, unlike what some people will insinuate.
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Maybe, just maybe, there is a middleground between the French and the US way  .
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On September 21 2016 00:04 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 23:27 Gorsameth wrote:On September 20 2016 23:06 Simberto wrote:On September 20 2016 22:35 Plansix wrote:
Let us force our children to pledge allegiance to the Republic and stand during for a song that has the word “the land of the free” in the finally. The home of the brave, where our greatest fear is our children will have different ideals that we do. What the fuck, does that seriously happen? Maybe it is my countries history, but i would be majorly freaked out if school children would be required to participate in some daily propaganda ritual. American patriotism has always had a serious fascist undertone. Be it the pledge or someone not standing during the national anthem. Pledging allegiance to a flag every morning does not mean that you're condoning drone strikes in the Middle East, unlike what some people will insinuate.
I'd say it definitely helps get you there. Combine it with media that pretty much only shows one side of the story (the US side) and you'll quickly be thinking "well, they must have a good Christian reasons to bomb the shit out of those people & I didn't waste half my life pledging allegiance to God's own country"
KwarK explains it better:
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United States43505 Posts
Incognoto it's a multi step process. Pledging allegiance to a flag is step 1, establishing the people as a big "us" is step 2, establishing any undesirables as "them" in direct opposition to "us" is step 3 and oppression is step 4. The way a nation gets loyal subjects is by earning them. And the way loyal subjects respond to flaws in their nation is by demanding the nation improve to continue to earn their loyalty, not by making the ability to ignore the flaws a test of ideological purity. The conflict is between those who think "America is pretty good but needs to work on these areas and if I refused to talk about them I'd be like a shitty friend who ignores my best friend's descent into alcoholism" and those who think "only the bestest of best friends could stand by and pretend not to see as their friend beats their wife". We're seeing this play out in real time with the black athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem, they're attempting to show a greater loyalty to the United States and a bunch of reactionaries are getting pissed because they think the athletes are failing a nationalistic test of ideological purity by refusing to stay silent when they see the US fail its own promise.
Incidentally I think the French are cool.
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On September 21 2016 00:14 KwarK wrote:
Incognoto it's a multi step process. Pledging allegiance to a flag is step 1, establishing the people as a big "us" is step 2, establishing any undesirables as "them" in direct opposition to "us" is step 3 and oppression is step 4. The way a nation gets loyal subjects is by earning them. And the way loyal subjects respond to flaws in their nation is by demanding the nation improve to continue to earn their loyalty, not by making the ability to ignore the flaws a test of ideological purity. The conflict is between those who think "America is pretty good but needs to work on these areas and if I refused to talk about them I'd be like a shitty friend who ignores my best friend's descent into alcoholism" and those who think "only the bestest of best friends could stand by and pretend not to see as their friend beats their wife". We're seeing this play out in real time with the black athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem, they're attempting to show a greater loyalty to the United States and a bunch of reactionaries are getting pissed because they think the athletes are failing a nationalistic test of ideological purity by refusing to stay silent when they see the US fail its own promise.
Incidentally I think the French are cool.
I'd be a hypocrite to say that pledging allegiance to a flag should be compulsory or that you shouldn't criticize the USA. The black athletes in question have their reasons and I'm not going to say nay to what they're doing (not informed enough on whatever issue they have either way).
What gets me ticked is conceited Europeans looking down on American patriotism, assuming that it's automatically bad and comparable to fascism. I think a little reality check is needed there.
Could we argue that the United States foreign policy is a mess? Sure we could debate on that.
Could we argue that media outlets in the USA are presenting a one-side of the issue only? Sure we could talk about that (though I don't necessarily think it's entirely one-sided).
Could we argue that an American displaying patriotism is barbaric, fascist, gun-shooting brainwashing? Is any patriotism whatsoever bad? I think that's a more than a bit of a stretch; it's also conceited and haughty. I know that Europeans are quickly abandoning any form of national pride (because of Nazi German history? maybe) and I'm not thinking that that's a good thing.
It's fine to be a patriot as long as you're able to evaluate the society or country you're in and say "yeah, this is a good place for me to be in". To be quite frank, if I'm living in Europe or in the United States, I think I can say that.
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