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Notes -
It's over for me.
We pretended that senile rambling old man was a president for four years and now the country is more divided than ever. I am ashamed of how I have treated people while I have been under the influence of that horrible man who helped break this country.
I say helped break because he didn't do it alone. Every person who covered for him, who made excuses for him, who refused to see that there was an old man with no control over himself (he was leaking constantly, he couldn't keep a secret. He couldn't keep a secret.) has some share of responsibility in this.
This is a serious situation that we let get out of control. And we need to be united, and I wish I had been able to admit that Trump was a divider sooner.
lol, I didn't even know there were 75 people here. You really hit a nerve.
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Not to worry, if all goes well you will have another four years of a senile rambling old man and the team covering for him to look forward to!
Does this do anything to help your anomie?
When did we become so bleak?
Well, the person you're replying to is Irish so... 1845 at the latest.
I've been bleak since the marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, when "the streets ran red with blood" to celebrate the union of the happy couple 😁
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While I agree with you at every point and in spirt; so much so that I though the guy was room temperature IQ incompetent before he even ran; you sound drunk. I know I am mildly enhanced at the moment. Good post though, maybe just not as a top level in this particular thread.
It's a garbage post, and would just be as garbage if it was about Biden (which I assumed it was on an initial skim).
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As far as I know, nothing in my life has ever been seriously changed by any of the last few presidents. If I was not paying attention to politics between 2008-2016, I could easily have assumed that a Republican was president. Likewise, if I was not paying attention to politics between 2016-2020, I could easily have assumed that some Democrat was in office. Likewise, if I was not paying attention to politics now I could easily believe that a Republican was president.
There are of course people whose lives do get significantly affected by who the president is, but I do not think that I am one of them and I am not sure that there are really very many of them in America. Presidents have more of an impact on foreigners through their decisions about the geopolitical and military leadership of the American empire and about immigration policy enforcement.
Iraqis and Mexicans have reason to care who the US president is. But for American citizens, is the impact really that much? Presidents are just all slightly different flavors of rich bullshitters who do not have much power to impact domestic politics anyway. I care more about who wins the presidency because of how it will impact foreigners than I do about how it will impact Americans because who wins the presidency might determine the lives and deaths of tends of thousands of foreigners, but it will likely do little to impact Americans much one way or the other.
As for the country being divided, why should I care?
I know that you are trolling but it is an interesting topic anyway.
This has been my position for a while, but I sometimes find it hard to support, like, I can't always rebuff arguments about supreme court, executive orders, etc. They do sorta matter, but it isn't apparent until some time has passed. For instance it took a decade for the effects of Clintonian repeal of Glass-Steagall, the creation of DHS, or Obama's NDAA2012 to become apparent. What seems to be the case, to me, is that the combined effect of the past 40 years of presidential politics is an increase in elitism and consolidation of power and wealth. There's a problem with the brain, not with a particular hemisphere.
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I think that unless you’re in an upper middle to upper class situation or economically depending on someone who is, almost all national politics are irrelevant. They just don’t impact the working class that much (with the exception of culture wars perhaps) and could likely be entirely ignored without much change day to day. The list of things that have been passed and repealed, wars we’ve started and won or lost or got bored with, and so one in my life is pretty darn long. And for the most part, other than entertainment, there’s not much reason for getting into the details of politics above the state level.
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Probably right. I’m curious if a competent administration was in placed that gutted the CDC would covid nonsense have metastasized?
I don't think institutions had much to do with it.We had no CDC-equivalent in Australia and we weren't exactly covid doves.
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There are 10000 more births in Texas after Roe v Wade got struck down. I was about to make an effortpost about how minor this Handmaiden Tale event actually turned out in reality. You can figure out the earthshattering events in retrospect so in a way it doesn't matter who is in power because more or less it is business as usual. And US system is designed to have enormous inertia.
For context, there were 51,606 abortions in Texas in 2021.
The 10k statistic applies to the last 9 months of 2022 — extrapolate that to a year and it’s 13.3k. So (theoretically anyway) 26% of the fetuses that would have been aborted are being born instead.
The others are presumably either being aborted out-of-state,
aborted in-state (iirc you can still get an abortion within 6 weeks of conception),or not occurring due to the use of other forms of birth control.No, you cannot. Texas law had a 6 week abortion ban from September 2021 until July 2022, and subsequently enacted a total ban on abortions except those medically necessary to save the mother’s life. Getting an abortion for a woman living in Texas requires 2-3 days and thousands of dollars(either airfare to New Mexico or gas to Kansas, cost of the abortion, and a hotel room), and no doubt some do anyways, but a lot of these abortions that weren’t replaced with births are probably the morning after pill in effect.
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To which demographics do those extra 10k births belong?
They’re probably majority Hispanic, because most women of childbearing age in Texas are. Of course blacks are probably overrepresented because this is one of those things where they usually are, but Texas isn’t black enough for them to be a majority.
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This is just the result of ongoing momentum. Most projects do not come to real life fruition for 5-10 years, so if a President starts a policy the day he comes into office, you might start to notice impacts at the end of his first term, and if it takes him until year two to start the project you'll barely notice it until the end of his second. If, as has been the case for many projects since Reagan, a single party/faction/project fails to capture the presidency for two terms and a successor then before the impacts of a project won't come to fruition until supporters of the other party/faction/project come into power, mitigating or preventing those impacts from occurring.
What you're seeing as stasis, it doesn't matter if the Republicans or the Democrats are in office, is the experience of sitting just above high tide and saying it doesn't matter if the tide comes in or out. You'd know fast if the tide kept coming, if the waters kept rising. There is a lot of activity, but never happened.
So one doesn't really notice a lifetime that runs Bush I -- Clinton -- Bush II -- Obama -- Trump -- Biden; but a very different world if it went Bush I -- Dole -- Bush II -- McCain -- JEB!; or if it went Clinton -- Gore -- Obama -- Clinton II. Trump doesn't really fit either way.
The conflict and the chaos produces the stasis.
I’d be kind of curious how much the initiatives you mentioned actually change things and how we’d distinguish the government initiatives from ordinary market changes or social changes that would happen either way and just happen to coincide with X years after Y initiative. I have a personal hypothesis that of the three, political organization is the least powerful. Economic innovation, new technology, and new social norms seem to have just as much if not more power to make things happen. I think most of the success of gay marriage had less to do with anything the government actually did and more to do with social changes that changed how people thought about the issue than anything the government did. New technology probably has more to do with improvements over the last five or ten years than any the President or congress did. New business innovations or new products change your life a lot as well.
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The things that a president does impact you, but not because the president does something and affects you immediately. It takes time for things to trickle down. The president can make a law which tells government agencies to do X. Five years later you employer has different policies than it otherwise have, in order to meet X. Another year later you're fired because of the indirect effect X has on how the company works.
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We seem to be having a spate of low-effort ramblings that are basically "I'm mad about something and want to vent." I am sorry if you're having an existential crisis over Trump (for months at a time now?) but if you are going to post a top-level post, please make it relevant, interesting, or at least present an argument. We don't want to see free-form rants about how Trump or Biden or whoever is The Worst, devoid of anything but your own undigested disgust.
An argument? You want an argument?
Every person who was wrong about Trump and his effect on this country needs to pray to God for forgiveness. I know I have.
If you spectated this disaster from the comfort of intellectual distance, you're part of the problem.
X being important is not somehow a rejection of the need to advance an argument for X. If you actually think it's so important that people come to God, you need to do more than berate them.
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Yeah, imagine. We could have had Hillary instead, and the Ukraine war would have kicked off eight years earlier.
I'm not a Clinton fan, but I doubt she would have been bad enough to retroactively start a war two years before her election.
I think she'd have been far more agressige in prosecuting whatever we were doing in the Syrian civil war. One of her stump points was establishing a no fly zone there (which would have meant shooting down Russian aircraft at the time she said it).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/25/hillary-clinton-syria-no-fly-zones-russia-us-war
Yes, this - this was only and sufficient point given on Less Wrong (or other rationalist space, do not remember after such long time) as reason for supporting Trump.
From rationalist perspective, avoiding raising the probability of escalation all the way into Global Thermonuclear War even by few decimal points beats any bad things Trump ever did or was expected to do at the time.
The argument otherwise knows as "Pascal's mugging". Once we select an infinitely negative utility event, and proclaim certain action has a non-zero probability to prevent this event (no matter how low), there's no cost which we shouldn't pay for performing this action, because nothing beats Global Thermonuclear War. If this argument proves anything is the limits of naively "rationalist" approach where anything can be mathematically calculated from a set of assigned probabilities and utilities.
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You found one of the five reasons I voted for him. it seemed obvious to me at the time that Hillary would have pushed NATO forces right up to the Russian border on Ukraine. She wanted Gaddafi’s, al-Assad’s, and Putin’s skulls on her wall, figuratively.
One of the “scandals” from before he was even in office was his “office of the President-Elect” having pre-inauguration contact with the Russian Ambassador, to reassure Putin that Trump didn’t want war. The point of having ambassadors is to ensure diplomacy! Talking with an ambassador is probably the furthest thing from collusion I can imagine.
This must be the reason Russian Sberbank paid her husband for "lectures" and why she approved sale of Uranium One to Rosatom after a modest bribe. All that was leading to nailing Putin's skull to the wall, somehow. Must be one heck of 3D chess.
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You expect accurate arithmetic in the midst of a polemic?
Well yeah, what else do I expect on this here site 🤣
I genuinely do believe Hillary would have been very eager to show she was Stronk Woman at the time, especially when it came to dealing with Putin, and if Syria wasn't enough to keep Vlad occupied I think he'd have made some move to show that NATO bitches not the boss of me.
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I think this person is 100% trolling because everything they’ve said doesn’t mention a name, and could easily be applied to everyone
Senile old man? Biden.
People were wrong about trump and should be begging for forgiveness? TDS sufferers.
They're 100% trolling because this is at least the second time they've had the same conversion experience, but yes, they also made it ambiguous that they were talking about Trump until the end
And the Kid Rock thing seems to be from 2017, though many sources intimate it was from 2021. Apparently he showed Kid Rock maps of North Korea.
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I would impeach Biden for being old and will accept any pretext whatsoever.
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The last sentence in the OP says Trump. Before that I did consider it ambiguous.
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That's not an argument, it's just ranting.
Hectoring, finger-wagging, and telling people "You're a bad person and you should feel bad" is not what this place is for. Go ahead and talk about why you think Trump is terrible and Trump supporters should repent, but right now you're not a lot different from a evangelical Christian yelling that we all need Jesus.
Well, we do, and maybe that's suitable preaching given that this is Sunday, but let's not get into the theological weeds right now? 👼
Why not?
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I feel like you and he are both missing the point - of course we know Christians believe this, but like anything else, if you want to make an effortpost about why Christianity is True and we should all accept Christ, you may do so, but don't just start preaching and calling people sinners.
WE ARE ALL SINNERS
IT IS KNOWN
Okay, y'know what? You're either drunk or trolling.
I'm giving you a three-day timeout to get sober and/or serious.
Come back and do this again and I'll assume you're just a dramanaut and act accordingly.
Out of everything they said, that was what threw you over the edge?
In a performatively tired tone: "Yes, yes, you can countersignal fascism (we need such people for maintenance and smugness purposes). But how dare you say we have sinned, or worse, everyone has sinned. The one thing we do not want entering these hallowed grounds is humility, forgiveness and the grace of God."
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You do need Jesus.
But that's neither here nor there.
Trump supporters should repent because it is wrong to turn brother against brother in politics.
I'll bite: what is it that makes you think Trump supporters are worse in this regard (turning brother against brother) than other political factions/subfactions?
One of the criticisms that stuck with me early on in Trump's presidency, don't know who said it, was that by embracing a politician whose action deliberately enraged the 'other side', we were furthering division in this country. I think that was undeniably true, and it was undeniably the sort of thing any proper conservative party should understand.
You think "basket of deplorables" Hillary wouldn't have been divisive, had she come to power?
I keep harping on about Mitt Romney, whom I think is a very whitebread politician and doesn't impress me greatly - had his ambitions ever gone anywhere, I think he would have been the Gerald Ford of the time (vaguely competent but uninspiring and not missed once his term was done).
For a while there he was The Only Good Republican from the same people who, back when he was running, were representing him as the Mormon theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale for real and start burning the gays at the stake and as for minorities -! We don't even want to think what he was going to do to BIPOC folx! He was just another Literally Hitler Rich White Cis Het Christian Republican who only cared about making money and grinding the faces of the poor. As for what he did to poor doggies, well the shame has never dissipated about his cruel heartless animal-hating treatment, remember that?
So don't talk about divisiveness being uniquely a Trumpian moment, I think it was in the building for a long time.
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Do you think Obama didn’t antagonize people? Yes, obviously from a blue tribe perspective, even a blue tribe conservative perspective, trump is uniquely divisive and shit, but there’s no actual reason a blue tribe perspective has to predominate.
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The conversion narrative loses all its rhetorical power after the first go-round.
Back then we didn't know about what he told Kid Rock.
I'm still dwelling.
Forgive me that this is where I dwell.
Conversion is a long, steady process, of slow erosion, and steady persistence. Time, repetition. You build a wall in a season and tear down a wall in a season, but a hole can be made right away...
That's really your last straw? Really?
That's when it broke for me, the illusion that this was ever a president.
You don't understand, I saw how the media treated Bush so I thought they were histrionic. Now I look at the people who are backing him in a hysterical narrative and I see a threat to the future of this country.
I see a generation of men being taught that winning is "declaring yourself the winner" and I despair.
Prior to that I didn't see just how much he never ever shut up and I understood: this is a chronic issue of the degradation of the boomer mind.
I don't believe you
What don't you believe?
Are you familiar with the phrase 'handle your business'?
Are you familiar with the phrase "business is pleasure when it's done right?"
This is a business place, where we discuss serious things seriously.
My question is genuine. Another phrase: "Put up or shut up."
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Any of it -- you talk like a liar.
This man thinks he tells the truth.
Concerning.
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What did who tell Kid Rock?
Google says that back in early June "An interview with singer Kid Rock telling Tucker Carlson that Donald Trump showed him 'maps of North Korea' during a 2017 White House visit".
And that’s bad?
It depends on what was marked on said maps; "Locations of secret facilities Pyongyang thinks they've hidden from us" could be very bad if it got back to them.
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My God, you are telling me an ordinary citizen got unfettered access to .... an atlas???? Who permitted this sort of breach of security, the plain people are not supposed to know about the existence of foreign nations unless and until their betters decide they need to know!
Meanwhile, under the Democratic president, we have trans people flashing their tits on the White House lawn. So much better!
It appears 2 out of 3 manufacturers of FDA-approved breast implants are all at least headquartered in the USA (the other one once was, and a fourth was until it closed this year), so... uhh, yay US industry?
To be fair, it was multi-representational as we had the trans people who had their tits cut off showing that off proudly as well as the trans person who got the fake boobs showing those off for the world, so yay good old American medico-cosmetic industry indeed!
I'm not sure about her bottom, was that a result of nature or enhancement as well? Where are the buttock implants manufacturers located?
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