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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On November 01 2016 23:36 zeo wrote:
I'm sure voting for the felon and one of the most corrupt politicians in American history is the smart thing to do. Blind zealotry can't make her the better candidate, just like how the Obama administration can't save her from criminal prosecution indefinitely. The swamp and muck goes too deep with her.
Again, I'm going to make the argument that a corrupt-but-competent president is preferable to an pure-but-incompetent one. Others may disagree with me, but for me, this is clear.
The hysteria being propagated is that Clinton's corruption means she's going to sell out America' interests to foreign powers for her own gain. Even if we take it as a given that she *is* as corrupt as the right-wing media portrays her to be, this is simply a massive over-dramatization. Most of the mundane day-to-day bullshit that the president isn't really "corruptible", in that it involves a lot of boring maintenance of things where there's very little way for her to profit by selling out America. Clinton can probably nickel-and-dime US interests for her own gain a couple times over the course of her career, but I don't expect her to get the basic shit wrong.
Trump on the other hand, has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to make rational decisions when put under pressure, an unwillingness to educate himself on important issues when his ignorance is laid bare, and a propensity to overreact to small slights against him. If all of these things weren't abundantly clear after his appalling debate performances, you weren't watching very closely. Coupled with his status as a political neophyte who has no fucking clue how Washington works, I expect him to have a high probability of mismanaging very basic shit as president. I'm not so deluded or paranoid to think that he's going to make himself some sort of fascist dictator. I just think that he's incompetent enough that on expectation he's going to unintentionally fuck up more things from his own ignorance and irrationality than Clinton is going to intentionally fuck up for her own personal gain.
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United States42973 Posts
On November 02 2016 00:56 biology]major wrote:
Even the rational and intellectual elite that comprise this forum are not immune to feels. The hypothetical by legallord really shows how detached from reality everyone is. A year and half of confirmation bias and hatred for the opposing candidate eventually leading to rationalizations so deep that murder is accepted, lmao, what a bunch of shills.
Dude. Remember two months or so ago when you said there was no evidence of Trump's racism beyond all the racist things he said and that what you really wanted were racist actions to prove that he was a racist. And then I brought up the "colored" housing applications case and you hadn't heard of it so I had to explain it to you. And then you said "well, that was a while ago so I hope he's changed his views since then".
That moral high ground you think you're holding right now. It's at the bottom of a chasm.
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When Ailes and Murdoch got high off of what CNN was smoking during the mid 90s, I think it's fair to say that CNN was relatively less biased than it is today and was overall a more even keel production; Crossfire, though a horrible show concept looking back, certainly did its part in giving both liberals and conservatives their air time, and the reporting focused on real time events, limiting the scope of any potential partisanry in presentation. Similarly, many TV media consumers still got most of their news from daily evening programs on main cable networks, and though Dan Rather is quite the public liberal nowadays, I think it's hard to dispute that folks like him and Peter Jennings were moderate in their reading of the evening news.
However, once Fox News started seeing returns on its "Fair & Balanced" and "Real Journalism" slogans during the early to mid 2000s, other media organizations tried to counter Fox's growing market share through imitating what was very clearly reporting that agreed with a particular worldview. Getting down to who exactly fired the first shot here doesn't seem very useful, and yes, the above doesn't address the other media trends manifest in print and internet forms, but I think the whole "the media at large is biased towards liberals" spiel requires a lot of disclaimer before it carries much weight.
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On November 02 2016 00:59 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:56 biology]major wrote:
Even the rational and intellectual elite that comprise this forum are not immune to feels. The hypothetical by legallord really shows how detached from reality everyone is. A year and half of confirmation bias and hatred for the opposing candidate eventually leading to rationalizations so deep that murder is accepted, lmao, what a bunch of shills. Dude. Remember two months or so ago when you said there was no evidence of Trump's racism beyond all the racist things he said and that what you really wanted were racist actions to prove that he was a racist. And then I brought up the "colored" housing applications case and you hadn't heard of it so I had to explain it to you. And then you said "well, that was a while ago so I hope he's changed his views since then". That moral high ground you think you're holding right now. It's at the bottom of a chasm.
Nope I'm the equivalent of Sean hannity here, just shit posting from the right to create some balance. Not much of a moral high ground for me to hold. The lengths you guys are going to support hrc is surprising as hell though.
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On November 02 2016 00:30 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:28 LegalLord wrote:On November 02 2016 00:23 KwarK wrote:On November 02 2016 00:19 LegalLord wrote:On November 02 2016 00:13 KwarK wrote:On November 02 2016 00:11 LegalLord wrote:On November 02 2016 00:08 zlefin wrote:
Why no escape clauses? that seems dumb, since in reality there are in fact escape clauses. Because the entire purpose is to see what it would take for said Hillary supporters to be so turned off from her that they would vote for Trump. Like, how bad does it have to be for them to actually tick off Trump in the ballot booth because Hillary was bad enough. For me the question reads "what would it take for you to support the rise of fascism?" so you can see how it's a tricky one to really answer. As I said, certainly not murder or anything like that. Would you vote for Trump in my scenario if it turned out she was extensively - and directly - involved in perpetuating the Rwandan Genocide? (purely hypothetical, there's no follow up "bombshell" I'm intending to link for this question) No, but I would support her indictment and trial for war crimes following Kaine taking office. Alright, then let's up the stakes a little bit. Say that tomorrow, Congress passes a law - and Obama signs - which holds that anyone elected president is immune from prosecution for all crimes committed before taking office, starting from when said candidate becomes president-elect until their last day in office. Would you vote for Trump then? No. And furthermore if she said she was going to use her four years exclusively to roam the country and hunt people for sport while using that new sovereign immunity from prosecution I'd still vote for her over Trump.
This made me laugh pretty hard
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United States42973 Posts
On November 02 2016 01:00 biology]major wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:59 KwarK wrote:On November 02 2016 00:56 biology]major wrote:
Even the rational and intellectual elite that comprise this forum are not immune to feels. The hypothetical by legallord really shows how detached from reality everyone is. A year and half of confirmation bias and hatred for the opposing candidate eventually leading to rationalizations so deep that murder is accepted, lmao, what a bunch of shills. Dude. Remember two months or so ago when you said there was no evidence of Trump's racism beyond all the racist things he said and that what you really wanted were racist actions to prove that he was a racist. And then I brought up the "colored" housing applications case and you hadn't heard of it so I had to explain it to you. And then you said "well, that was a while ago so I hope he's changed his views since then". That moral high ground you think you're holding right now. It's at the bottom of a chasm. Nope I'm the equivalent of Sean hannity here, just shit posting from the right to create some balance. Not much of a moral high ground for me to hold. The lengths you guys are going to support hrc is surprising as hell though.
Supporting HRC =/= opposing Trump.
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On November 02 2016 00:57 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:55 Hagen0 wrote:
Distrusting the US electoral process is quite rational. I don't get why that incited so much pearl clutching. Trust in the electoral system is what allows us to peacefully overthrow the government every four years and have everyone, from all sides of the political spectrum, accept the result. It's what stops diehard leftists and rightists shooting each other in the street. It's literally what keeps politics from anarchy.
It's an illusion though. There is very good evidence that the elections 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio were rigged to a substantial margin. More recently, the Democrat primaries also included massive purging of voter rolls in New York and elsewhere, massive statistical irregularities in many states, large deviations from exit polls again in many states and tons of personal statements by election staffers and voters alleging fraud. Give me a few minutes. I'll look up my links.
Election rigging is an old USAmerican game that got really off the ground after the introduction of voting machinery.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On November 02 2016 00:31 TheTenthDoc wrote:
If I'm forced to use all my 270 electoral votes for Trump or genocide Clinton, I wonder how I got into this hellish world and just give up.
BREAKING NEWS: No next president chosen, office to remain vacant. New Supreme Court nominee yet to be confirmed.
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United States42973 Posts
On November 02 2016 01:06 Hagen0 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:57 KwarK wrote:On November 02 2016 00:55 Hagen0 wrote:
Distrusting the US electoral process is quite rational. I don't get why that incited so much pearl clutching. Trust in the electoral system is what allows us to peacefully overthrow the government every four years and have everyone, from all sides of the political spectrum, accept the result. It's what stops diehard leftists and rightists shooting each other in the street. It's literally what keeps politics from anarchy. It's an illusion though. There is very good evidence that the elections 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio were rigged to a substantial margin. More recently, the Democrat primaries also included massive purging of voter rolls in New York and elsewhere, massive statistical irregularities in many states, large deviations from exit polls again in many states and tons of personal statements by election staffers and voters alleging fraud. Give me a few minutes. I'll look up my links. Election rigging is an old USAmerican game that got really off the ground after the introduction of voting machinery.
I'm sure zeo can help you find those links.
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On November 02 2016 00:57 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:51 ticklishmusic wrote:
there are plenty of reasons i wouldn't vote hillary if they turned out to be true. it's a little ridiculous to play the hypotheticals game, which is very much part of the guilty until proven innocent/ clinton rules ilk and is really just an argument in bad faith.
but that doesn't change the fact that trump has given me zero reasons to vote for him. The hypothetical is really just a more indirect way of asking, "how committed are you to the 'anyone but Trump' line?"
i'd pretty committed to support anybody but an orange ignoramus who undermines our democracy. it's pretty o keefe-like to try and wring out a "ticklish would vote for clinton after she admitted to abusing a 12 year old while bill watched" though.
i'm proud to support the clinton that i know. i would be ashamed to support the trump i know, and i would be ashamed to support various hypothetical clintons or whatevers. but the last one is quite meaningless.
and anyways, if we apply even a modicum of the clinton standard to where she's guilty of pretty much everything she's accused of until proven otherwise as long as its not too crazy of a theory to trump, then he's pretty much a child rapist and tax evading fraud. oh, and his taxes probably show he's not a billionaire and most of his couple hundred mill came from some strangely friendly russians. however, i don't really feel the need to play that particular game because the trump i know is already so amazingly shitty.
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The latest theory I've heard circulating is that the Russians have a sex tape of Trump either in an orgy or with very young girls. A honeypot fits Putin's MO and no one can plausibly say Trump wouldn't fall for it. McMullin claims Russia has spent five years getting Trump under their thumb.
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Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.
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“Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.
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Mr. Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy, and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment.
The story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents offer only a partial description of events, and none of Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article.
At the time, Mr. Trump would have been hard-pressed to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early 1990s when Mr. Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his various bank accounts.
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Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good.
But what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i.e., Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?
Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt [using a loophole previously closed by Congress]?
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Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
The New York Times
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On November 02 2016 01:06 Hagen0 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:57 KwarK wrote:On November 02 2016 00:55 Hagen0 wrote:
Distrusting the US electoral process is quite rational. I don't get why that incited so much pearl clutching. Trust in the electoral system is what allows us to peacefully overthrow the government every four years and have everyone, from all sides of the political spectrum, accept the result. It's what stops diehard leftists and rightists shooting each other in the street. It's literally what keeps politics from anarchy. It's an illusion though. There is very good evidence that the elections 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio were rigged to a substantial margin. More recently, the Democrat primaries also included massive purging of voter rolls in New York and elsewhere, massive statistical irregularities in many states, large deviations from exit polls again in many states and tons of personal statements by election staffers and voters alleging fraud. Give me a few minutes. I'll look up my links. Election rigging is an old USAmerican game that got really off the ground after the introduction of voting machinery.
you realize the purge in ny helped sanders right?
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On November 02 2016 00:55 Hagen0 wrote:
Distrusting the US electoral process is quite rational. I don't get why that incited so much pearl clutching.
I don't think making claims with no evidence is terribly rational. And I can assume you Trump's claims are not based in evidence, because they simply never are.
On November 02 2016 01:06 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:31 TheTenthDoc wrote:
If I'm forced to use all my 270 electoral votes for Trump or genocide Clinton, I wonder how I got into this hellish world and just give up. BREAKING NEWS: No next president chosen, office to remain vacant. New Supreme Court nominee yet to be confirmed.
We'll be down to a 6-person court by 2020 anyway.
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Trump is so ignorant that I could totally see him becoming an accidental fascist.
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On November 02 2016 01:00 farvacola wrote:
When Ailes and Murdoch got high off of what CNN was smoking during the mid 90s, I think it's fair to say that CNN was relatively less biased than it is today and was overall a more even keel production; Crossfire, though a horrible show concept looking back, certainly did its part in giving both liberals and conservatives their air time, and the reporting focused on real time events, limiting the scope of any potential partisanry in presentation. Similarly, many TV media consumers still got most of their news from daily evening programs on main cable networks, and though Dan Rather is quite the public liberal nowadays, I think it's hard to dispute that folks like him and Peter Jennings were moderate in their reading of the evening news.
However, once Fox News started seeing returns on its "Fair & Balanced" and "Real Journalism" slogans during the early to mid 2000s, other media organizations tried to counter Fox's growing market share through imitating what was very clearly reporting that agreed with a particular worldview. Getting down to who exactly fired the first shot here doesn't seem very useful, and yes, the above doesn't address the other media trends manifest in print and internet forms, but I think the whole "the media at large is biased towards liberals" spiel requires a lot of disclaimer before it carries much weight.
I have a different perspective. The rise of FNC's editorial board journalistic style aside, FNC (and other elements of conservative media -- ie talk radio) wasn't the first organization to jump into biased journalism so much as it was the first conservatively-biased new organization. As such, FNC polarized the debate, thereby showing and making obvious the liberal bias that was always there among the mainstream journalistic elements. The Drudgereport became a thing because it broke the Lewinsky story when the mainstream media sat on the story.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On November 02 2016 01:09 ticklishmusic wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2016 00:57 LegalLord wrote:On November 02 2016 00:51 ticklishmusic wrote:
there are plenty of reasons i wouldn't vote hillary if they turned out to be true. it's a little ridiculous to play the hypotheticals game, which is very much part of the guilty until proven innocent/ clinton rules ilk and is really just an argument in bad faith.
but that doesn't change the fact that trump has given me zero reasons to vote for him. The hypothetical is really just a more indirect way of asking, "how committed are you to the 'anyone but Trump' line?" i'd pretty committed to support anybody but an orange ignoramus who undermines our democracy. it's pretty o keefe-like to try and wring out a "ticklish would vote for clinton after she admitted to abusing a 12 year old while bill watched" though. i'm proud to support the clinton that i know. i would be ashamed to support the trump i know, and i would be ashamed to support various hypothetical clintons or whatevers. but the last one is quite meaningless. and anyways, if we apply even a modicum of the clinton standard to where she's guilty of pretty much everything she's accused of until proven otherwise as long as its not too crazy of a theory to trump, then he's pretty much a child rapist and tax evading fraud. oh, and his taxes probably show he's not a billionaire and most of his couple hundred mill came from some strangely friendly russians. however, i don't really feel the need to play that particular game because the trump i know is already so amazingly shitty.
I dunno, I'd probably vote for "tiny hands not-billionaire tax-evading child-rapist fascist" Trump over "murdered American soldiers in Benghazi and committed countless war crimes while undermining the government with her emails while defending Billy's rape habit" Clinton. Trump just happens to come out of that hyperbolic smear game slightly less badly.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
this is all debunked a few times. muh exit polls on repeat
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the guy from stanford is a psych postgrad, so slapping the stanford name on it doesnt make it any better. if anything, it probably annoys the very reputable polisci department there.
and the democracy lost thing is a gish gallop of epic proportions that no one in their right mind would actually bother penning a full refutation to. though i suppose kwizach might make a heroic attempt at doing so.
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EPT
