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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The senate democrats finally win a victory to permanently extend health benefits for retired miners,
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/331345-ohio-senator-miners-won-huge-victory-in-spending-bill?amp
edited 1st May '17 6:18:42 AM by megaeliz
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Yes. And the coal miners will still support him and treat the Democrats like human garbage, because that's just the world we had the misfortune of living in.
edited 1st May '17 6:23:22 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryI saw one quote once about the free speech thing that I thought was pretty good.
"If the only defence you have for what you said is that it isn't technically illegal to say, you might not have a valid point." You see that a lot. Someone says something completely awful, they get asked why they said that, and their explanation boils down to "Free speech, baby!" Which is a terrible explanation and reason. Just because you won't get thrown in prison for saying something doesn't mean you should go ahead and say it.
Trump has no understanding of the Civil war. Just please, stop trying to sound smart! You're awful at it.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/331349-trump-why-was-there-the-civil-war?amp
edited 1st May '17 6:29:55 AM by megaeliz
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The United States is remarkably lax when it comes to legislating hate speech, unlike many other Western nations. So if anything the bigots have more freedom here than they do elsewhere.
Figures that Trump worships Jackson.
edited 1st May '17 6:35:09 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The thing with Freedom of Speech is that as a philosophical concept, it is supposed to exist to guarantee good faith public debate about important issues. I would be willing to say propaganda, intimidation and hate speech are antithetical to the objectives of free speech because they attempt to bypass and/or suppress that kind of debate.
Speaking about Trump and speech, here's an interesting Opinion Piece
from the New York Times about Trump's speech patterns.
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
As researchers at Carnegie Mellon pointed out last spring, presidential candidates in general use “words and grammar typical of students in grades 6-8, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.” Indeed, among the presidents in the university’s analysis, Trump’s vocabulary usage was the lowest and his grammatical usage was only better than one president: George W. Bush.
Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.
As New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his 2016 book, “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?”: “The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.”
Thompson also notes that “Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,” warning that:
“We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.”
Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.
It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts.
But this is what comes from a man who is more watcher than reader, a man more driven by the limelight than by literature.
In January, Vanity Fair attempted to answer the question: “Exactly How Much TV Does Donald Trump Watch in a Day?” They did so by producing this utterly frightening roundup:
“Early on in the campaign, Trump told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he gets military advice from TV pundits. He couldn’t get through a 50-minute Washington Post interview without repeatedly looking at the TV and commenting about what was on it. In November, during the transition, The Post noted that, based on his biography, ‘He watches enormous amounts of television all through the night.’ And just this week, a source told Politico that Trump’s aides are being forced to try and curb some of his ‘worst impulses’ — including TV-watching, apparently: ‘He gets bored and likes to watch TV … so it is important to minimize that.’”
A piece in The New York Times in the first week of Trump’s presidency noted: “Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.”
Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.
At no time is this more devastatingly obvious than when he grants interviews to print reporters, when he is not protected by the comfort of a script and is not animated by the dazzling glare of television lights. In these moments, all he has is language, and his absolute ineptitude and possibly even lack of comprehension is enormously obvious.
In the last month, Trump has given interviews to print reporters at The Times, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. Read together, the transcripts paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.
In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.
This is one of the most heinous acts of this man: the mugging of the meaning, the disassembling of rhetoric until certainty is stripped away from truth like flesh from a carcass.
Degradation of the language is one of Trump’s most grievous sins.
edited 1st May '17 6:37:29 AM by IFwanderer
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVWhy, it's very simple. The United States had a civil war because a bunch of slave-owning aristocrats committed treason and seceded from the Union in order to preserve their right to own other human beings.
Then they got stomped into the ground by an industrially, demographically, morally and militarily superior force, and they've been bitching about it ever since.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.How the ACLU prepared for Trump.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40407576/how-the-aclu-is-leading-the-resistance
Apu explains the Civil War
Also don't know if it had an official source, but the quote paraphrased here
is also a favorite of mine and I first encountered it here on this board last year-ish.
edited 1st May '17 6:52:18 AM by sgamer82
The people that voted for him to spit in the face of “special treatment progressive trigger-warning SJ Ws” must be kicking their own teeth now
If they weren't so deep in denial, or had self-awareness to begin with
Still, there's no way the coal miners will be that delusional and ungrateful.
And I meant it to Trash Jack.
edited 1st May '17 6:54:36 AM by Luigisan98
The only good fanboy, is a redeemed fanboy.
Don't say that. They'll take it as a challenge. The white working class members of the GOP tent rival the civilians of the Marvel Universe for sheer Ungrateful Bastard-ness.
And yes, I am still that cynical, although I view myself more as the Knight in Sour Armor type rather than the Straw Nihilist type.
edited 1st May '17 7:00:33 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryVideo-based news organization, Now This, did a table reading of an unproduced screenplay written by Steve Bannoni in the late 90s about the LA Riots.
Yep. Someone should probably check their water for lead contamination.
Jesus Christ it's even worse than I thought. Actual dialogue:
"YOU SORRY ASS!" "STAY, MOTHERFUCKER!" "MEASURELESS LIAR!"
"You who be no less chicken shit than Uncle Tom!"
It's a unholy fusion of Shakesperean language and what a white guy thinks black people speak like.
I hate it so much I almost love it. Does that reading contain the full script? I need to see all of it.
I need.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
Time is not something that's on our side. If they cat-ass their way to realizing the GOP is full of ****, that means we're stuck with Trump for another term, and the GOP-run Congress for far longer than we should. Not to mention that unlike comic book characters, humans age and permanently die. It's very possible that they'll die of old age without ever changing, and bring their own kids up to be exactly like them.
Besides, Spider-Man and the X-Men are almost always hated and feared no matter what they do, and any moments when they're not (e.g. Spider-Man just before Superior Spider-Man) exist only to Yank the Dog's Chain. Exactly like post-Civil Rights Act Democrats in the South.
edited 1st May '17 7:32:09 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary

Trumpites view the First Amendment as being a protection from criticism, rather than a protection from political suppression. His views aren't unique — every person who responds to pushback and criticism when they say something racist or discriminatory with, "I have the right to free speech," as if that prevents another person from saying their statement is bullshit, is feeding into the same sentiment as Trump.
Liberals, for their part, have to stop offering the milquetoast's defense of free speech — which is not at risk — every time a reactionary goblin says something offensive that people of conscience vocally oppose.
"I hate saying this, but there's actually quite a lot of Americans who really take their free speech for granted. Many of them are or would be okay with abolishing the First Amendment, or at least don't realize it when asked. Not a lot of people want to give Neo Nazis or the KKK a place to speak, for instance."
You kind of wrote the refutation of this quoted passage in the rest of your post. One's rights end where another's rights begin. Neo-Nazis and the KKK advocate the suppression, deportation, and extermination of racial, sexual, and religious minorities. To give them a platform is to legitimize their views — and the actions of their supporters — as a part of the political space.
edited 1st May '17 6:20:36 AM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."