Election 2020

suspended said:

I've never ever been pro-Trump. I've called him (search results) shitty, shallow, selfish, self-obsessed, an idiot, impotent, incompetent, and immoral, and have never once voted for him.

My position on this board has always been pushing against what I see as a tactically disastrous, selectively uncharitable, and borderline hysterical overreaction to Trump by liberal quarters. It has never been that Trump is a good president, good man, or someone who I support.

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OK, I'll take you at word about Trump. And you've said before that you never voted for him. However, every time I've seen you describe him in any kind of negative terms it's been followed by a "but...", or in some way balanced by a statement that the real problem is hysterical liberals, or identity politics, or some other entity framed in opposition to Trump.

It's the same with John Eden and Brexit. He says he didn't vote for it in the referendum, and he's never come out and said "It was a great idea and I'm glad it happened", but the only times he ever mentions it is to tell someone (usually me or Rich) who is unequivocally against it that we're wrong, or to post a context-free link about how the EU is bad. There's only so far you can take being anti-anti-Trump or anti-anti-Brexit before the two anti's start to look like they're cancelling out.

If you read my excellent essay "Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare" I think me & Eden's position-taking would appear more reasonable/enlightened than you perhaps currently view it.

I, like Gus, know how it feels to be scorned by people who are wealthier, better looking and more socially polished than I am so I totally sympathise

luka said:

I, like Gus, know how it feels to be scorned by people who are wealthier, better looking and more socially polished than I am so I totally sympathise

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Everyone knows this simple fact of existence

luka said:

I, like Gus, know how it feels to be scorned by people who are wealthier, better looking and more socially polished than I am so I totally sympathise

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You know, I probably cared until age 24ish, and then I realized they were all (mentally ill + desperately unhappy + self-loathing + not especially talented), and I haven't since.

Mr. Tea said:

OK, I'll take you at word about Trump. And you've said before that you never voted for him. However, every time I've seen you describe him in any kind of negative terms it's been followed by a "but...", or in some way balanced by a statement that the real problem is hysterical liberals, or identity politics, or some other entity framed in opposition to Trump.

It's the same with John Eden and Brexit. He says he didn't vote for it in the referendum, and he's never come out and said "It was a great idea and I'm glad it happened", but the only times he ever mentions it is to tell someone (usually me or Rich) who is unequivocally against it that we're wrong, or to post a context-free link about how the EU is bad. There's only so far you can take being anti-anti-Trump or anti-anti-Brexit before the two anti's start to look like they're cancelling out.

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Tea let us set aside this fruitless matter and discuss flora in my thread.

woops said:

Everyone knows this simple fact of existence

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Except for the good-looking wealthy people.

well, sheeeit!

Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/ (https://archive.is/z45Mb#selection-527.7-527.351)

Yeah, a scary part as noted is the lack of a decent Democratic opponent. Even Biden supporters are hard pressed to imagine him having the stamina to run another campaign and serve another four years, and Kamala Harris, the next logical candidate as VP, has been invisible since taking office and was not a great candidate last time.

suspended said:

Tea let us set aside this fruitless matter and discuss flora in my thread.

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Hmmm, OK.

Fungi are still way cooler tho.

@suspended: a few pages ago you challenged me to produce a poll relating to the beliefs and values of Republican voters. Well as it happens, I happened across this the other day:


Now, just to pre-empt you: sure, I suppose it's possible that someone could subscribe to this gibberish without being consciously or explicitly racist, and maybe there are even a few QAnon believers here and there who aren't white themselves - although in every photo of QAnon supporters I've ever seen, the crowd has been whiter than the driven snow. But the central fact is that the Q mythology is just a 21st-century rehash of the ancient anti-Jewish 'blood libel' that was used to justify pogroms in Europe since the middle ages, that it grew out of the "Pizzagate" incident which was itself seeded by a white-supremacist Twitter account, and that the "liberal elites" central to the Q mythology are frequently linked to, or identified with, either "The Jews" in general, "Zionists", or prominent Jewish individuals such as George Soros or the Rothschild family.

Marjorie Greene, who is probably the most high-profile QAnon supporter, is unequivocally a far-right white supremacist.

And among people who've been suckered into this, there's naturally a huge overlap with conspiracy theories that are inherently racist, such as the 'Cultural Marxism' bugbear and the Great Replacement theory.

Mr. Tea said:

@suspended: a few pages ago you challenged me to produce a poll relating to the beliefs and values of Republican voters. Well as it happens, I happened across this the other day:

Majority Of Republicans Believe The QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Partly Or Mostly True, Survey Finds

72% of Democrats say the QAnon conspiracy is “not true at all.”

www.forbes.com

Now, just to pre-empt you: sure, I suppose it's possible that someone could subscribe to this gibberish without being consciously or explicitly racist, and maybe there are even a few QAnon believers here and there who aren't white themselves - although in every photo of QAnon supporters I've ever seen, the crowd has been whiter than the driven snow. But the central fact is that the Q mythology is just a 21st-century rehash of the ancient anti-Jewish 'blood libel' that was used to justify pogroms in Europe since the middle ages, that it grew out of the "Pizzagate" incident which was itself seeded by a white-supremacist Twitter account, and that the "liberal elites" central to the Q mythology are frequently linked to, or identified with, either "The Jews" in general, "Zionists", or prominent Jewish individuals such as George Soros or the Rothschild family.

Marjorie Greene, who is probably the most high-profile QAnon supporter, is unequivocally a far-right white supremacist.

And among people who've been suckered into this, there's naturally a huge overlap with conspiracy theories that are inherently racist, such as the 'Cultural Marxism' bugbear and the Great Replacement theory.

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If you're gonna count this kind of lite anti semitism as racism, it's equally prevalent on the American left. Do you leave your house?

And if you've ever been to an elite university you're aware they're all Marxists

(In name and publicly advocated belief, if not always in practice, but this is true across the political spectrum. Pretend radicals who put their money where their enemy's mouth is.)

Why do you come on this board to make a fool of yourself?

I do think there are probably more whackjobs on the right, because the right has aligned itself with evangelical nonsense most. No protest there. But I don't see QAnon belief as a racial gottem whatsoever.

Don't you find it a little gross, spending your time crawling for evidence the Other Group is bad? Sure, you can protest you don't do that intentionally, but it's what liberals wants which is why lib-catering media and social media networks provide it in such abundance. And if you grew up in a conservative culture, you'd think some pretty heinous things about Dem morals too.

Don't you just want to let the bigotry go? Remember your brothers, even if they believe that deep state elites are undermining democracy? Because that doesn't make them bad people, in my book. People believe all sorts of crazy things that seem all the crazier taken out of context. Probably 33% of the left believes all cops are bastards and the police force needs abolishing—or did come the 2020 election. (People know polls get published, and they vote strategically as if representing a side. If you read my Discursive Games post you'd get this.) How do you think ACAB sounds to a widow of an officer killed in duty? Or to the officer paralyzed from the waist down?

But I don't hate those people just because I think they're a bit cuckoo. Not even because their cuckoo theories are a little cruel. I just assume they're concerned citizens—righteous and moralizing like most people are—confused and overwhelmed by the pressure of understanding endlessly complex global politics which they have no personal experience in—but their heart in the right place.

Now grant you, I too do some generalizing about libs on this board too. But I try to keep it in check, and most of my fire and brimstone is towards specific members on the board I see acting as uncritical mouthpieces of ideology. Which is, I believe, different than working tirelessly to convince oneself and others that massive demographic swathes of the population are Bad Guys. (A practice which, were I more 'analytically inclined, I'd call "splitting.")

suspended said:

If you're gonna count this kind of lite anti semitism as racism, it's equally prevalent on the American left. Do you leave your house?

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Implicating Jews in the ritual sacrifice of white Christian children is "lite anti semitism"? What then do you consider the real deal?

suspended said:

Don't you find it a little gross, spending your time crawling for evidence the Other Group is bad? Sure, you can protest you don't do that intentionally, but it's what liberals wants which is why lib-catering media and social media networks provide it in such abundance. And if you grew up in a conservative culture, you'd think some pretty heinous things about Dem morals too.

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I'll write a proper reply later, but for now all I'll say is that to go "crawling" for evidence of the modern GOP's dysfunction would be a bit like searching for sand while standing on a beach.

And it's totally false to frame this as a "conservatives vs liberals" issue, involving two more or less equivalent sides that have different but equally valid ways of seeing things. We're talking about a cult that believes child-murdering warlocks secretly rule the world. If there's one thing that ain't, it's conservative.