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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
It's (not) strange, but you know what really gets to me about all the talk about the person sending bombs in this thread?
That everyone automatically started referring to said person as 'he'. Which really irks me in light of the whole 'Trump administration is trying to define trans people out of existence' thing.
I know I'm getting hung up on one single issue, but damnit, thread, Trump, or more accurately Pence's people in the administration, attacking trans rights is a huge fucking deal and while that getting overshadowed by some shadowy shitbag sending murder devices to people isn't surprising or wrong, the literal least one can do is keep the former in mind and not assume the gender of an unknown person in a discussion while that stuff is going on.
And yeah, no, I'm not saying it's a woman or a trans person or an enby, that's all very unlikely, but that's not the point. The point is that we don't know for sure and yet we immediately assume and that's something we really shouldn't do.
Angry gets shit done.
By percentage, how many mass murderers and bombers have been female?
Yeah. Most terrorists in America are white men. It's just what it is.
And let's be clear, this is absolutely a terror attack. It's an act of violence for political means meant to kill key public figures and stir up fear and intimidation leading into the Midterm elecitons.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 25th 2018 at 8:20:12 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub....so...left, then?
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.So there’s a second to Biden, bringing the current package total to 10.
Edited by Bur on Oct 25th 2018 at 9:51:34 AM
Whoever the bomber is, they are a fucking idiot. The package sent to Biden had the wrong address and was set to return to sender.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/25/politics/bombs-clinton-obama-waters-biden/index.html
Probably a former r/physical removal, (a now defunct subreddit about how killing "leftists" was fun) user I'd hazard a guess.
Does anyone know how the Reich's new meme of "All leftists are just NPC sheep" started? They seem to be on a "nobody can think but people who hate minorities" kick even more than usual lately.
Something White Male Protagonist. Something video games. Something Mighty Whitey. Something thus all minority characters tend to be NP Cs.
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Bastardization of cog-sci research.
Okay, one of the more interesting results from cognitive science, and one of the more well established ones as well is that the ability to form mental images varies enormously. Some people have very strong visualization where they can "see" mental images of things they remember or imagine in great detail, and some people cannot do this at all, and mostly just assume that other people talking about this are speaking in some form of metaphor. Nope, literally a different way of thinking. - Which does not correlate with intelligence - it is just a matter of how your brain processes.
It turns out that just like there are people who think entirely non-visually, there are people who internal mind-state is entirely non-verbal. No internal dialogue. Again, no notable link with intelligence.
But.. lots of people identify really strongly with their internal dialogue, so proceed to collect a full set of logical fallacies and declare that obviously you cannot be really thinking without one. This is me eyerolling so hard I can read the serial number etched into my cranium.
Edited by Izeinsummer on Oct 25th 2018 at 9:19:48 AM
And NP Cs always give the same stock responses no matter what you do.
Even more cynically: they only exist to serve the PC's story
I suspect it might be an indirect power fantasy, because by painting their opponents as NPCs they're painting themselves as the Player Characters, whom the story is really about and who are the centres of the universe, their every need catered to by the mindless non-players; and most importantly, how history will one day vindicate them as the 'true heroes'.
And since Video Game Cruelty Potential is a thing, it's likely that it also plays into a Nice Guys Finish Last mindset, and that you can only get ahead by exploiting other people - who better to exploit than people who are too caught up in such trivialities as 'empathy' and 'basic respect' to realize the harsh truths behind the world?
Of course, the truth is that real life has no NPCs, but it has no main characters either; it's more like an MMORPG. Just one with exorbitantly high subscription rates, and nigh-omnipotent mods, and no character creation options, and making you jump through hoops if you want to change any aspect of your avatar, and it takes hours if not days in real-time to get anywhere, and the story is complete garbage and nothing makes sense, and if you die in the game you die in real life... that is, the game. This analogy has broken down somewhat. :V
Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Oct 25th 2018 at 5:26:48 PM
Those sell-by-dates won't stop me because I can't read!With Trump out stumping on his usual message of hate and discontent, are we giving hatred too much credit
?
Trump obviously believes his strategy of riling voters up with bigotry is effective. What’s striking is the political press agrees with him. “This pure brute force from Trump could work,” notes NBC News, “because there is no equal response from Democrats.” On Twitter, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman asserted similarly that this “controversial, race-baiting” rhetoric has been “effective for him politically.” And looking at these remarks in the context of the 2016 election, Axios asserts that “immigration and stoking fear about Mexican immigrants propelled Trump to the White House.”
But this conventional wisdom—that bigotry wins votes and elections—depends on imprecision around the idea of “effective.” The media has taken the fact that Trump became president after making those appeals as evidence they broadly work; the fact that Republican primary voters endorsed Trump’s nativism and xenophobia has somehow become proof that it’s a viable election strategy whenever it’s deployed. But neither claim—and both are key assumptions made by political analysts in the Trump era—stands to serious scrutiny. And while Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric undoubtedly resonates with many Republicans, there’s no strong indication that it works on its own as an “effective” message among Americans writ large.
Republicans beyond Trump have made a similar gambit that racist insinuation will energize their supporters and move voters in their favor. In a predominantly white congressional district in upstate New York, GOP political groups have attacked Democrat Antonio Delgado, who is black, as a “big city rapper” who favors “handouts” from the government. In Florida, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron De Santis has attacked his black opponent, Andrew Gillum, in terms that evoke racist tropes. In California, Republican incumbent Rep. Duncan Hunter has attacked his Arab-American challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, as a “security risk” with potential ties to “radical Islam.”
The proof of concept behind this strategy is Trump’s successful election. Trump relied on racism and anti-immigrant sentiment to drive his message, the argument goes, and while it may have produced some defections among college-educated whites, it also attracted enough whites without degrees to win narrow victories in places where they formed a large share of the voting population, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But missing from this narrative is the critical influence of Trump’s extremely optimistic message on jumpstarting the economy, which co-opted and muddled Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric on issues like wages and infrastructure. To voters cross-pressured by cultural conservatism on one end and liberal economic views on the other, Trump promised a synthesis attuned to their identities as blue collar white Americans—they could have both.
It’s that synthesis which—along with Clinton’s stark unpopularity and extraordinary events like the FBI’s intervention—produced Trump’s victory. In its absence, Republicans have not fared nearly as well, even as they’ve tried to replicate the president’s strategy of open and explicit bigotry.
There’s concrete evidence of this. In the final weeks of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race, Republican Ed Gillespie remade himself as a demagogue by playing on white racial resentment with ads blasting Democrat Ralph Northam for “sanctuary cities” and the MS-13 gang. He promised to protect the state’s Confederate monuments and tried to tie Northam to professional football player Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality. Gillespie lost by 9 percentage points, and Virginia Republicans came one seat from losing an almost 20-year majority in the House of Delegates.
Alabama Republicans similarly chose an authentically Trump-like figure, Roy Moore, to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate. He ran a Trump-like campaign of dishonesty, demagoguery, and casual bigotry. He was even accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women who alleged inappropriate behavior when they were teenagers and he was an attorney in his 30s. Despite this controversy, he was favored to win, running in an electorate that hadn’t chosen a Democrat for statewide office in more than a decade. But a Democratic surge, and Republican disenchantment, produced a surprise win for Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee.
Most recently, the Republican candidate in the special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, Rick Saccone, described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump.” He ran as an acolyte of the president in a district that politically and demographically favored the Republican Party. He lost by a slim margin to Democrat Conor Lamb.
The key difference between Trump and these candidates? Economic messaging. Trump rejected conservative economic wisdom on retirement spending and other social programs during his presidential campaign, but neither Gillespie nor Moore nor Saccone had an economic agenda distinct from the national Republican Party. (Saccone ran away from the president’s signature legislative accomplishment—the Tax Cut and Jobs Act—on account of its deep unpopularity.) So while they could mobilize core supporters with appeals to racial threat, they couldn’t reach those cross-pressured voters, compete with conventional Democratic candidates, or overcome an active and energized Democratic electorate.
For further evidence, you can look to Senate races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. As a candidate, Trump promised to tailor his economic policy to their needs; as president, he pursued large, upper-income tax cuts and pushed deep cuts to Medicaid and other social insurance programs. The result has been backlash against the GOP as Democrats recover lost ground even in the face of the president’s racial demagoguery. Some of this is Democratic mobilization against the president and his constant presence in national life, and some of it reflects shifting partisan loyalties among white voters with college degrees. But some of the change is also Democratic improvement with voters who backed Trump two years ago.
Republican politicians wouldn’t be scrambling to announce their support for key parts of the Affordable Care Act—and President Trump wouldn’t have fabricated a middle-class tax cut—if the party weren’t aware of the necessity of a viable economic message. And the extent to which voters don’t believe Republican rhetoric on health care and taxes might actually explain the sudden increase in the intensity of the president’s attacks on undocumented immigrants and other marginalized groups, as well as his decision to embrace terms like “nationalist” to emphasize his commitment to a racialized vision of citizenship and belonging. His economic bet is not working this time, so he’s leaning hard on what he perceives as his other strength.
The energy is so high and the political environment so unique that it’s difficult to project an outcome for November, even if polls continue to show a Democratic advantage in the race for the House and a Republican one in the race for the Senate. President Trump and his allies clearly hope that by stirring the demons of American life, they can create an electoral barrier high enough to stop any potential blue wave.
But the elements that rendered Trump effective in 2016—a heterodox economic message, an unpopular opponent, and outside influences—do not exist in 2018, and the media would do well to remember that. Republicans can still fan the flames of fear, but there’s no guarantee that won’t generate Democratic energy in opposition.
Racial hysteria has been a part of many winning campaigns in our country. But it’s rarely the only part. Trump is gambling that it, and it alone, can carry him and his party past the finish line for a second time. But this is a gamble, and one that is more likely to fail than they seem to realize.
I undervalued the role of racism in Trump's election but I do note that a lot of posters here tend to assume that Trump's racism is all he's got going for him. However, my argument is that a Republican who does the exact same thing won't automatically win Trump's devoted following. Instead, I have the theory Trump like Bush is appealing to multiple box tickings of the "Homer Simpson for President" effect.
The fact Trump is the branded idea of what a millionaire is in America and a success probably sold a lot of Americans on the idea, "So he knows how to make money." The Irony in all that.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 25th 2018 at 10:23:04 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The Republicans are doing a questionable thing
.
Sorry, I don't have access to more than the headline: Grassley refers Avenatti and Swetnick to Justice for a criminal probe. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) on Thursday referred lawyer Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick — one of the women who accused now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh of misconduct during his confirmation proceedings — to the Department of Justice for a criminal probe, alleging that they made
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Also, let me point out that Trump is, of course, a thousand times worse than Clinton ever was on the issue of national security
given how the article points out the whole unsecured phone thing....yet we are not seeing a fraction of devoted coverage compared to the apocalyptic importance the media gave the email server, an issue nobody cared about before or since and never would have cared about if it didn't involve Clinton.
The cover story is that he’s too dumb and poorly informed to spill classified information, which is certainly reassuring.
You can’t stop Republican hypocrisy. But there’s no reason on Earth reporters should take arguments being offered in comically transparent bad faith seriously.
The punchline?
Edited by Lightysnake on Oct 25th 2018 at 6:56:54 AM