ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

Besides some social constructs, all religions are about is reaching a state to love yourself/feeling of self worth in this relatively dog eat dog world. Islam Christianity etc all teach this. All religions have been historically perverted by self hate away from that aim and used to control or worse. (see some current issues we have in ME)

Man didn't invent God. Some occasionally discover Him hidden in their own hearts.

People who post repeatedly on forums of games they never play, get banned for being disgusting, then create another account (a parody), should be banned yet again.

Just saying.

So um TDS_Deported, have you accepted the conclusion of the Mueller Report in regards to his determination that no one from the Trump campaign was involved in a criminal conspiracy with Russian agents?

Genuinely curious.

Hey now, I asked first.

Molasses edit: Fine, I'll go first. I accept the conclusion of the Mueller report that while it doesn't conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him of obstruction either.

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The_Impeacher wrote:

Because of DOJ policy, he cannot be indicted as a sitting President. But that report is LOADED with evidence of crime and corruption. The best part is every day, he and his admin are committing new crimes, which will insure that the statute of limitations will not be an issue.

The Congressional hearings will bring the document to life.

It's a crazy time to be alive.

What is most important to the Trump fans is that Mueller did not find conspiracy between Trump and Russia. They don't seem to care that he breaks the law as described in the obstruction of justice half of the Mueller report. This obstruction of justice is not about lying about getting a blow job as in the Bill Clinton case. This obstruction of justice is about obstructing the investigation into Russia helping Trump win the 2016 election.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Whatever game he's playing, Democrats have been losing to him. If you say he's playing tic-tac-toe on a checkerboard, Democrats are playing Fling the Turd.

Really?

Because in the last election, his party got its ass handed to it, maintaining the senate only because the electoral map was downright abysmal for the democrats.

In special elections across the country, his party has either been taking close elections in what should be sure things, or losing elections they have absolutely no business losing.

To the degree that he's achieved his electoral platform, it's because his goals aligned deeply with the goals of the actual evil genius in government, that modern Gaius Gracchus, Mitch McConnell, and even then they failed to repeal Obamacare. We're not just no closer to a border wall, we're actually quite a bit further than we were in the past. (Even then, Mitch's genius basically boils down to "huh, y'know, if we shatter all congressional norms, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop us from doing so and it furthers our agenda", so the emphasis really is more on the "evil" than the "genius".)

Trump himself? I'm sorry, calling him a "genius" by any stretch of the imagination is laughable. In many cases, the main thing standing between him and his goals has been himself. He's made countless absurd own goals in terms of both policy (starting a trade war with the whole world was never a good idea) and legal strategy (firing the head of the FBI, then bragging about doing it to end an investigation into your election was also a really bad idea). Every day he does some new headline-worthy thing that makes people groan and say, "what the fuck?!" The main advantage he has is that his base is so batshit crazy (see also: everything Xav or Aim_Deep says) off a non-stop diet of conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda news that none of this shit matters to them, and so none of this shit has to matter to them.

The actual "evil geniuses"? Mitch McConnell, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, possibly Steve Bannon. Trump is the recipient of all of their collective genius, all of the advantages they've built up over the years for republicans. And he still manages to keep his approval rating around the 30s and 40s.

Praising Trump's genius because he won the 2016 election by the skin of his teeth is like praising his business genius because "he's rich, of course he's a great businessman" and ignoring essentially every detail involved in how and why he's been so successful (hint: it has to do with the fact that damn near nobody is willing to lend him money any more). Everything we know about him indicates that he's impulsive, narcissistic, dumb, uninterested in learning, deeply dishonest, and has no respect for any institution beyond "how can I use this to my advantage". Hell, you can get that from 10 minutes on his twitter feed.

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You're correct that the currency in a free marketplace of ideas is attention. But you're implicitly arguing for an impossibility. Correctness can never be a currency. It can't be spent; opportunity cost doesn't apply to it; you can't trade something and get correctness in exchange.

The driving force behind any market is not its currency; currency is merely a medium of exchange. The driving force behind a healthy market is rational self interest. However, when the driving force behind purchasing decisions is something else, the market can accommodate.

If that's the case, then the marketplace of ideas is deeply diseased. If we insist on keeping the metaphor, then the existence of major popular figures like Alex Jones or Stefan Molyneux as serious cultural influences is akin to if the marketplace sold people coffee laced with arsenic and cocaine. There is no reason sunlight should not have already disinfected these people.

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When I say sunlight is the best disinfectant, I don't mean in terms of the marketplace of ideas; I mean in terms of human evolution. Those religions you mock, for all the obvious lies in them, helped propel the societies who believed in them to live while others died. Even the challenge you proposed — to name a major religion that died to competition from competing ideas — shows you don't understand how ideologies work; it's like a creationist thinking he's stumped a biologist by asking him to name a major species that has gone extinct due to natural selection. Major religions are resilient organisms, because they historically have made their hosts more resilient — less likely to die, more likely to breed, and more likely to pass the religion to their offspring.

Ah. So this has fuck-all to do with the truth, and rather "what helps the organism".

First thought: why the fuck is fascism back on the rise? Last time that happened it damn near killed Europe. It's an extremely attractive philosophy to some people that, when it succeeds, is deeply harmful to everyone. In the model of memetic evolution, it's a parasitic infection that eventually kills the host.

Second thought: that's a huge shift in the argument. I was explicitly talking about the problem of bad ideas spreading. You responded with "sunlight is the best disinfectant". But now that has nothing to do with whether the idea is right or not, and instead to do with how it helps society survive? Well firstly, ideas that are never tested don't tend to matter for survival. Aim_Deep's nonsense ideas are only going to matter if and when they're tested, at which point things are unlikely to go well.

Third thought: if we're talking about ideas surviving, "treating ideas like the plague" seems like an excellent idea! Shunning people who hold bad ideas and quarantining nonsense is a really good way of shutting down bad ideas! Deplatforming demonstrably works. It won't hurt the true believers, but Alex Jones simply has not been nearly as public of a figure once he was thrown off social media. Milo Yiannopolous is basically acting as a classy rentboy to pay his bills since he lost the spotlight. Richard Spencer canceled his tour because Antifa made it "no longer fun" for him (just so we're clear, this is a good thing, and exactly why antifa exists). Sunlight absolutely is not the best disinfectant, it is a necessary ingredient in the growth of the infection.

I'm honestly confused where any of this is going. I've lost the plot, if you will. Gimme a hand, will you? Are we talking about the truth of ideas, or whether ideas are helpful to society? Aim_Deep's ideas fail on both fronts spectacularly. What, exactly, is "sunlight" supposed to do to an idea like that?

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Lest you begin thinking this is a digression, the point is that cultures are different rubrics for assigning value hierarchies, and value hierarchies are used to determine expenditure of scarce resources such as attention. Attention paid such that it makes us less likely to die and more likely to breed (without disturbing homeostatic equilibrium with our habitat) is what determines which cultures rise and fall. The cultures that promote paying attention to dumb shit will not last in the grand scheme of things, and those that do will inherit the future and — if we can use the Sunlight Method of tying their downfall to their culture — be laughed at by children of future generations, not to be repeated again.

Have you seen Ian "InnuendoStudios" Danskin's "The Alt-Right Playbook" series? Because reading this it seriously reminds me of the most recent video, "Always a bigger fish", in a rather chilling way.

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RPGlitch wrote:

Well, I guess we need more republican presidents then, lol.

Jokes aside, I don't know why the data is skewed that direction. You and others have said it's because people are more familiar with ACA, but that doesn't sound reasonable to me.

I don't think people now are any more educated on it, then they were for the last 4 years, when they were paying the fines and doing the paperwork.

I think it's entirely possible that a great many people are deeply confused about Obamacare, and that that still remains true even after the repeal attempt.

But despite that, a certain kind of misinformation was very cleanly and clearly exposed during the repeal effort.

To quote from that Atlantic article I cited:

"For years, Republicans promised lower premiums, lower deductibles, lower co-payments, lower taxes, lower government expenditure, more choice, the restoration of the $700 billion that President Barack Obama heartlessly cut out of Medicare because he hated old people, and (in the particular case of the Republican who recently became president) "insurance for everybody" that is "much less expensive and much better" than what they have today. They were lying. Over and over, Republicans lied to the American public about healthcare. It was impossible to do all of the things they were promising together, and they knew it."

And during the repeal effort, it became painfully clear that none of that was true. Just like it became painfully true that certain other claims made by the right about the ACA were untrue - see also: the entire rest of the article, documenting insane statements like this one from Breitbart: "The Slaughterhouse Three, Obama, Pelosi and Reid, have authored the legislation that will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage".

So people are still probably misinformed about Obamacare. It's a complex law and if you don't follow politics closely (or if you follow politics closely but get most of your news from the kind of people likely to lie about it, i.e. literally anyone in the right-wing media sphere), you're not going to understand it very well. But a certain kind of misinformation, that was overwhelmingly negative, has largely gone the way of the dodo. A whole lot more people get it now - they understand that the republican promises and threats were simply lies. And that's led to a significant growth of support for Obamacare. The turning point was when the AHCA passed, and the CBO predicted it would kick tens of millions off of healthcare. It's hard to argue "Obamacare sucks, republicans will pass something better" when you hear a verdict like that.

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Its just like that poll where more people disliked Trump's tax-cuts. Which was absolutely silly if they bothered to read the plan.

Honestly I've outlined multiple good reasons to dislike the Trump tax cuts, and there are many more, if you're not utterly self-interested, painfully short-sighted, and unable to weigh opportunity costs. It's a bad bill that serves primarily as a massive handout to the rich, serving as pro-cyclical policy and juicing an already relatively healthy economy at the cost of massive cuts to our social safety net.

That poll makes sense even if people understand the policy completely. There's a reasonable case to be made that it's bad policy, just like there's a reasonable case to be made that Obamacare is bad policy. But while the case against the Trump tax cuts was made, by and large, in a reasonable manner (the most "out there" thing I've heard about it is "they're going to use this as an excuse to go after social security", which was right on the money) the case against Obamacare consisted in large part of statements like this:

"If they pass health care, government health care, that is the end of the republic. That is the final nail in the coffin of the individual free human being. Once they own your body, they own everything. Once they can withhold health care from you, because you're too old, because you're too sick, or maybe 'cause they just don't like you -- did you ever think about that?"
- Jim Quinn

Or this:

"Sir, you're overweight. What? Yes, sir, you are overweight, we're going to have to require you to lose weight. And if you don't lose weight on your own, we're going to send you to a fat camp and make you lose the weight. And if you still don't lose the weight, then you know, we're just going to have to do surg—we're just going to have to put you in jail. And if you don't lose the weight in jail, sir, I don't know what else to do. Maybe some end-of-life counseling might be good. I mean, I remember a woman that got—that was greased by Dr. Kevorkian because she was fat."
- Chris Baker, on Glenn Beck's show

Can you even find a liberal take on the Trump tax cuts that comes close to being as insane as either of those statements? If not, maybe chill with the false equivalences.

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Trump got rid of the individual mandate in 2017. It doesn't take into effect till 2019. But by then. I don't believe there is any penalties to simply ignoring Obamacare. (aka making it a toothless bill)

The mandate still applies until this year, and the penalty for last year will be applied this tax season, so the first time it doesn't apply is the 2020 tax season. And all of the other important (and popular!) provisions of Obamacare, like sharing your parents' insurance until 26 or an end to pre-existing conditions, are still very much active.

However, that's also deeply concerning. The current edition of Obamacare isn't "toothless". It's a two-legged stool - wildly unbalanced, with a decent chance of pulling the entire insurance market down with it. You cannot realistically have insurance coverage that disregards pre-existing conditions without an individual mandate. It's possible that enough people just keep their health insurance that this doesn't matter. It's also possible that this leads to a complete collapse of the shared market. This is the kind of incredibly stupid idea one could only expect from an administration with no idea what the hell it's doing.

In other news, how's our state propaganda network doing?

https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1120687139233128448

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In summary:

A right-wing militia group kidnapped migrants/detained them at gun point

Fox News described it as "trying to help" & "stopping illegals after they cross the border" while highlighting how the groups sees themselves as "patriots" and airing their fundraising pitch

Fucking yikes.

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The_Impeacher wrote:

Because of DOJ policy, he cannot be indicted as a sitting President. But that report is LOADED with evidence of crime and corruption. The best part is every day, he and his admin are committing new crimes, which will insure that the statute of limitations will not be an issue.

The Congressional hearings will bring the document to life.

It's a crazy time to be alive.

TDS_Reporter is back, with even more TDS than should've been possible! Nice.

I like how your brain physically can't process the fact that there was no conspiracy or coordination with the Russians. The cognitive dissonance is so big that it's literally impossible for you to admit that Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination. Very interesting indeed.

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Xavderion wrote:

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The_Impeacher wrote:

Because of DOJ policy, he cannot be indicted as a sitting President. But that report is LOADED with evidence of crime and corruption. The best part is every day, he and his admin are committing new crimes, which will insure that the statute of limitations will not be an issue.

The Congressional hearings will bring the document to life.

It's a crazy time to be alive.

TDS_Reporter is back, with even more TDS than should've been possible! Nice.

I like how your brain physically can't process the fact that there was no conspiracy or coordination with the Russians. The cognitive dissonance is so big that it's literally impossible for you to admit that Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination. Very interesting indeed.

Can we stop calling people with differing political affiliations mentally ill, please?

I know your 4/8chan and alt-lite/right nature is overflowing Xav, but it seriously stopped being funny around the time we all realised it's a fake mental illness you're accusing people of.