US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6217

On November 13 2016 15:56 xDaunt wrote:

I wanted to see Chappelle. But yes, SNL blows.

On November 13 2016 16:15 Slaughter wrote:


Oh Chappelle is good. Was he good for the episode?

On November 13 2016 15:30 xDaunt wrote:

It's more of the same liberal tone-deafness and unfounded arrogance that we all have come to love and expect. And spoiler alert: the show didn't improve after the opening. I just watched the news segment, and these clowns are trying to score morality points by talking about how divided the country is and how we must come together and talk, all while making this feel-good, inane point in the middle of a relentless barrage of jokes shitting on half of the country. Hmmm, I wonder where this national division comes from? Yeah, fuck those people. May God smite them with a plague of Pepes.

The only redeeming value of this SNL episode is Chappelle.

Perhaps you've heard the old joke about the New York Times headline at the end of the world: "World to end tomorrow; women, minorities hardest hit."

Well, the Times lived up to the stereotype today with its front page headline on Donald Trump's shocking upset: "Democrats, students and foreign allies face the reality of a Trump presidency." The story in question covers the entire front page above the fold, as you can see in the video above.

On "Morning Joe," Bloomberg's Mark Halperin pointed out that there's no way an upset by a Democratic candidate in a similiar situation would have been covered this way. "Their headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run New York Times are about what has happened," he said.

Co-host Joe Scarborough was equally merciless: "This is actually a 'Saturday Night Live' skit," he said. "You went to a cocktail party the night before, and you decided to write this."

On November 12 2016 21:39 WhiteDog wrote:

I approve of this message.


Thsi blog is everything that's wrong with modern politics : some scientific gibberish (you have genes !) and abstraction to justify stupid naming.
For exemple, if the first point was right, then every kind of abstraction is possible : you can criticize any german for its indirect involvement in the 2nd WW, you can judge any kind of jew for the killing of Jesus (ho those damned basterds ho my gad). It's resentment politics : you might not be a camel, maybe you're a lion, but you're certainly not a child.

On November 12 2016 22:26 xM(Z wrote:
Today's society = your society?, the white society?, every society that fucked up its history somehow?. i'd say it should be the later and if so, you know that arabs massively trafficked black people a few centuries ago(an estimated 17millions), right?; yet when they come to you, to your society, you don't have them make amends for their past/history.
(so you have there a double standard, a bit of defeatism and racism).

I'm going to tell you the weirdest and, yet, most obviously true thing you've ever heard:

You're not a person.

This is going to sound like some real Rust Cohle shit, but bear with me because deep down you already know all of this.

For instance, you already know that you are, to a certain degree, a product of your genes -- they go a long way toward determining if you would be physically imposing or weak, smart or stupid, calm or anxious, energetic or lazy, and fat or thin. What your genes left undecided, your upbringing mostly took care of -- how you were raised determined your values, your attitudes, and your religious beliefs. And what your genes and upbringing left undecided, your environment rounded into shape -- what culture you were raised in, where you went to school, and who you were friends with growing up. If you had been born and raised in Saudi Arabia, you would be a different person today. If the Nazis had won World War II, you would be a different person, still.

God knows we would be different.

So, even when personal choices finally come into play, you're still choosing within that framework -- you can choose between becoming a poet or a software engineer, but only because you were raised in a world in which other people had already invented both poetry and computers. That means every single little part of your life -- every action, every choice, every thought, every emotion, every plan for the future, everything that you are and do and can potentially be -- is the result of things other people did in the past.

These mostly dead people shaped every little molecule of you and the world you inhabit. You are the product of what they did, just as they were the product of those who came before them. You are, therefore, not a person any more than a leaf is a tree. It makes far more sense to think of yourself as one part of a whole (the "whole" being every human who has ever lived) than as an individual -- you benefit from the whole's successes, and you pay for its mistakes as if they were your own -- whether you want to or not.

As evidenced by you being the one to read this on your laptop, rather than being the one who paid pennies to assemble it.

This is not abstract philosophy, this is not something you can choose to believe or not believe -- this is a statement of physical fact. Refusing to acknowledge it will only leave you endlessly confused and frustrated. For instance, when you show up at a job interview, or a trial, or the set of a porno, that whole context will walk in the door with you. Everyone in that room will be making certain assumptions about you and will hold certain expectations, based on the greater whole of which you are a part.

That means you can't think of your life as a story. You have to think of it as one sentence in a much longer story ... a sentence that doesn't make any sense out of context. But, understand the context, and you will understand your life.

the errors of what came before = who gets to define an error and how far back does before go?; monkey times?, neanderthal times?, modern human times?, pre-Columbus/italians/vikings/Biruni times?, american slavery times? ... Adam and Eve?.

and this part - "and that even if you are not personally to blame, as part of the society in which it is wrong, it is your responsibility to help in improving society" it's missing something or you purposely left out "except the ones that are to blame based on their forefathers errors that came before".

somewhere along the line you decided that only white dudes fucked up so only they have to rectify what "they" did before.

Edit: and as a trivia do you even know how slavery started? - people with goods(arabs, whites, asians, whomever) were going to Africa and were trading said goods for slaves. the slaves were exchanged for those goods by the African king who owned them.
so, black african kings had black african slaves which they traded for goods. have african-americans rectify their errors.

On November 13 2016 20:05 Penev wrote:
Trumps seems to have found a way out of Paris agreement
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/13/trump-looking-at-quickest-way-to-quit-paris-climate-agreement-says-report

On November 12 2016 22:43 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
What an awful blog. At one point it claims that white people have a responsibility to fix inequality. It asks that a black genius be regarded individually in terms of potential, but a white minimum wage person must be regarded as part of a gesalt cultural force. Awfully Americocentric. Very bizarre. I suppose this can only be understood as a specific cultural product of American culture. Nowhere else is there the term "angry white man" just as the concept of "happy black woman" doesn't exist.

Changing that [refers to problems caused by systemic discrimination] doesn't mean they're winning, and you're losing. This isn't about you. There is no "you" at all, outside of this larger context. It's about continuing this winning streak humanity has been on, and trying to build a world in which everybody -- from the poor white dude in the trailer park to the black trans woman in Russia -- has the best possible chance to make something with their lives. We can disagree about how exactly to do that, but as for those people talking about the "good old days" and getting back to "traditional" values? The best thing I can say about them is that they can't possibly know what they're asking for.

On November 13 2016 20:18 WhiteDog wrote:
Are you expecting Jews to acknowledge the damage they made for Jesus and repair the damage ? Are they all responsible for Gaza ? Should all muslim acknowledge their indirect involvement in the terrorists attacks in Paris and repair the damage ?

What X did, only X is responsible of, not the great grandson of X, nor Y who belong to the same community as X.
Funnily enough, this kind of argument oftentime comes with a critic of the individual responsability : it is so diluded in the collective, that any kind of action is immediatly linked not to the man who made it, but to the collective.
Collective penance has no real utility for politics, it only helps in giving psychological relief to individuals. If you want to face an inequality or a wrong doing, then create an institution, a law, a system of redistribution, do not tell groups to shut up and ask forgiveness.

By the way, I disagree about Germany : Germany didn't acknowledge it's responsability for the nazi, they made the entire humanity responsible.

On November 13 2016 20:37 Nebuchad wrote:


xDaunt, this and things like this are why some of us are scared. You keep talking about partisanship, and maybe you do that because of what happened in 2012, I don't know. But I wasn't there in 2012, and I'm scared, and when republicans do things like this they give me valid reason to be scared.

I notice Trump supporters in this thread are really really not eager to have this discussion. That's fine, we don't have to have it. But if we don't have it, we can't then roll back to partisanship being the only reason why some people are not very willing to unite in this instance.

On November 13 2016 21:07 Wegandi wrote:


Are we back on the AGW train again? The world is not going to end. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus no matter what we do and yes perhaps some coastal communities will get displaced in the very long run, but that's going to happen no matter what as land masses change through plate tectonics and climates naturally change. People who have bought into the Doomsday prophets are about as useful as the religious Doomsday risen up to Heaven folks. They're equally unlikely occurrences :p

By the way, I always get a kick out of the environmentalists against greenhouse effect. Assuming you guys are right about some warming (which given recent studies on solar effects on climate vis a vis cosmic rays on cloud cover and its effects on temperature is not something I'd be a bettin' man on) that's going to be good for plant and tree growth. Honestly, when it comes to climate there is no such thing as normal. I'm curious what the AGW people want? Nothing we will do will create a static unchanging environment. We can have arguments about whether electric production with means other than fossil fuels is more cost-effective in the long-run and if the short-term effects on coastal communities is more harmful than the short-term effects and costs of increasing energy (which will happen if you ban fossil fuel consumption) on general population(s) and costs of goods, but the Al Gore like doomsday cries don't help anyone.

On November 13 2016 21:07 Wegandi wrote:


Are we back on the AGW train again? The world is not going to end. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus no matter what we do and yes perhaps some coastal communities will get displaced in the very long run, but that's going to happen no matter what as land masses change through plate tectonics and climates naturally change. People who have bought into the Doomsday prophets are about as useful as the religious Doomsday risen up to Heaven folks. They're equally unlikely occurrences :p

By the way, I always get a kick out of the environmentalists against greenhouse effect. Assuming you guys are right about some warming (which given recent studies on solar effects on climate vis a vis cosmic rays on cloud cover and its effects on temperature is not something I'd be a bettin' man on) that's going to be good for plant and tree growth. Honestly, when it comes to climate there is no such thing as normal. I'm curious what the AGW people want? Nothing we will do will create a static unchanging environment. We can have arguments about whether electric production with means other than fossil fuels is more cost-effective in the long-run and if the short-term effects on coastal communities is more harmful than the short-term effects and costs of increasing energy (which will happen if you ban fossil fuel consumption) on general population(s) and costs of goods, but the Al Gore like doomsday cries don't help anyone.

On November 13 2016 21:07 Wegandi wrote:


Are we back on the AGW train again? The world is not going to end. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus no matter what we do and yes perhaps some coastal communities will get displaced in the very long run, but that's going to happen no matter what as land masses change through plate tectonics and climates naturally change. People who have bought into the Doomsday prophets are about as useful as the religious Doomsday risen up to Heaven folks. They're equally unlikely occurrences :p

On November 13 2016 21:07 Wegandi wrote:


Are we back on the AGW train again? The world is not going to end. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus no matter what we do and yes perhaps some coastal communities will get displaced in the very long run, but that's going to happen no matter what as land masses change through plate tectonics and climates naturally change. People who have bought into the Doomsday prophets are about as useful as the religious Doomsday risen up to Heaven folks. They're equally unlikely occurrences :p

By the way, I always get a kick out of the environmentalists against greenhouse effect. Assuming you guys are right about some warming (which given recent studies on solar effects on climate vis a vis cosmic rays on cloud cover and its effects on temperature is not something I'd be a bettin' man on) that's going to be good for plant and tree growth. Honestly, when it comes to climate there is no such thing as normal. I'm curious what the AGW people want? Nothing we will do will create a static unchanging environment. We can have arguments about whether electric production with means other than fossil fuels is more cost-effective in the long-run and if the short-term effects on coastal communities is more harmful than the short-term effects and costs of increasing energy (which will happen if you ban fossil fuel consumption) on general population(s) and costs of goods, but the Al Gore like doomsday cries don't help anyone.

On November 13 2016 18:03 Danglars wrote:
A friend told me the NYT ran a very editorial-page headline for their coverage the day after, and it was humorous. It took me until today to actually look it up. Oh man. It was Democrats, students and foreign allies face the reality of a Trump presidency. Not the disaffected white Trump voters, the impact on domestic politics, no wrapping it up. But MSNBC of all outlets did a better job than I would do telling the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHgpb3S44-A

The Washington Examiner

We'll all move past this and the protesters will eventually pack up their bags and set fires on twitter instead of the streets where I work. The media has got to be laying some groundwork now to recover their trust ratings back to above Congress's. For all I know, Trump will present some terrible Keynesian stimulus package to GOP political donors day one. The media will go all out but only a select few outlets will have a chance at persuading the people. They stand justly accused of negative and hateful reporting on any story that begins with "Trump" and contains a verb, regardless the underlying facts. Beyond that, the task is to heal the divide, restart discourse that goes beyond "Love Trumps Hate," and shake out which factions have the power now and any possible compromise to be had.