US Politics Thread

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laserblue said:
Even that's a brazen lie. 64 US service personnel were killed in Afghanistan on Trump's watch. 4 more were killed in Niger and at least one in Mali.
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It’s shorter to point out the stuff he says that aren't lies. He has the same mentality as the kids at school who lied to try to impress you.

Most have probably grown out of it by the time they are in adult diapers though.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
It’s the opposite issue that is driving all of this. Huge in-migration to cheaper, warm states from the coasts turning reliable red bastions purple. So reds in power are trying to hold on to what they have. Witness so many formerly red states: California. Colorado. Washington. Oregon. Orange County, CA was as reliably red as it gets when I lived there 30 years ago. Now look at it. Purple at best. Now look at all the red states that went blue for Biden. Georgia. Nevada. Arizona. GOP is freaking out about potential blue futures of Virginia, North Carolina and — the big daddy of them all — Texas.

I’ve said this so many times before: it’s a last stand against the liberals move. What liberal is moving to Alabama if abortion is punished by death? This is all very calculated to create barriers to border seepage from within the US. It’s doomed to fail ultimately because demographics is destiny. But it’s going to be very, very painful as reds fight with whatever they can. Think of A Madrid against City. No tactic is too underhanded.
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I know some of you don’t buy my thesis but here’s a good example of it . . .

 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
I know some of you don’t buy my thesis but here’s a good example of it . . .

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Honestly, the U.K. is by no means perfect, but if there was a “mainstream” politician coming out with white like this, he wouldn’t last ten minutes before the media ended his career.
 
@Fode N The Hole
RE Oxford English Dictionary
I looked and looked and finally found the software box for my copy of the OED. The box comes with a small manual, 2 CDs and a floppy disk! with which to install the program. Unfortunately I cannot find the two CDs.

I very much enjoy looking up words in the OED - often a fascinating story unfolds, tracing the origin of a familiar word. One or two boxes remain that might contain those CDs... but I've not much hope.
 
Fode N The Hole said:
It’s shorter to point out the stuff he says that aren't lies. He has the same mentality as the kids at school who lied to try to impress you.

Most have probably grown out of it by the time they are in adult diapers though.
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Not if you are a sociopath , they lie as a matter of course and he will never change because he cannot.
 
BlueMoonAcrossThePond said:
When I read "Joe Walsh" I thought it referred to this guy:


The musician Walsh doesn't seem to be a Trump fan either:
www.rollingstone.com

The Last Word: Joe Walsh on the Eagles, Trump and Turning 70

Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh on the group's future plans, turning 70 and the best advice he ever got
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
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Joe Walsh was the only really great thing about the Eagles. I like his solo stuff much better than most of what they did -- especially "Life's Been Good."
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Joe Walsh was the only really great thing about the Eagles. I like his solo stuff much better than most of what they did -- especially "Life's Been Good."
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I really love Walsh - especially after watching some recent interviews/broadcasts of him. I liked the Eagles as well.... a confluence of talented musicians.

One of my favorites of Joe's:
 
SWP's back said:
Good, serves the fucking idiots right.

View attachment 43455
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As terrible as Covid is, so help me, I can't help but see a silver lining. Deaths and near deaths due to COVIDmust have served as a wakeup call to those on the Right. Snap out of it! - scientists are almost always correct, and we'd do best to follow their guidance.

Yet, even in the face of death of loved ones, and near death experiences of self... the Right's toxic individualism and science denial remains unexpectedly strong.

Unfortunately, it may take a black death-level catastrophe to wake the science deniers up.
 
BlueMoonAcrossThePond said:
As terrible as Covid is, so help me, I can't help but see a silver lining. Deaths and near deaths due to COVIDmust have served as a wakeup call to those on the Right. Snap out of it! - scientists are almost always correct, and we'd do best to follow their guidance.

Yet, even in the face of death of loved ones, and near death experiences of self... the Right's toxic individualism and science denial remains unexpectedly strong.

Unfortunately, it may take a black death-level catastrophe to wake the science deniers up.
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The science denial of the cult is IMO largely a function of Trump's science denial, which was solely a function of him not wanting to shut down his precious economic growth engine to fight off the pandemic. Recall he's a germaphobe -- it never made any other kind of sense for him to react as he did outside this context.

And a large portion of his supporters took the cue from him, and that morphed into a broad denial of science generally, because then many of these folks had to rationalize why they didn't believe Fauci but might believe some other scientist on some other topic. Easier to say they're all wrong -- then your brain doesn't have to work so hard to resolve conflicting information.

The same thing has happened on other topics/issues as generalizations and stereotyping are easier and faster than resolving conflicting/diverse points of view. It's easier to be absolutist. I do it too about the Trumpian cult.

But when polls show "85%+ of Republicans/Trump supporters say '_____'", the data tends to support such a generalization, which is why I keep doing it.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
The science denial of the cult is IMO largely a function of Trump's science denial, which was solely a function of him not wanting to shut down his precious economic growth engine to fight off the pandemic. Recall he's a germaphobe -- it never made any other kind of sense for him to react as he did outside this context.

And a large portion of his supporters took the cue from him, and that morphed into a broad denial of science generally, because then many of these folks had to rationalize why they didn't believe Fauci but might believe some other scientist on some other topic. Easier to say they're all wrong -- then your brain doesn't have to work so hard to resolve conflicting information.

The same thing has happened on other topics/issues as generalizations and stereotyping are easier and faster than resolving conflicting/diverse points of view. It's easier to be absolutist. I do it too about the Trumpian cult.

But when polls show "85%+ of Republicans/Trump supporters say '_____'", the data tends to support such a generalization, which is why I keep doing it.
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I grew up in a very conservative household. My father, son of a Missouri farmer, staunch lifelong conservative, and a PhD mathematician, was stubbornly anti-fact. He doubted medical opinion - and lost his teeth due to his dismissal of the efficacy of flossing - he doubted scientific findings on the danger of pollution and took up the side of industry - he doubted medical research outlining the dangers of smoking and its effects, including second hand smoke; and so on.

I think that science denial was widespread among the Right way before Trump as evinced by my father - Trump and the support he received from Fox and other right-leaning outlets simply made science denial socially acceptable if not admired. And from there, the floodgates of lunacy opened wide. The Right's "tent" of acceptable views burgeoned, to include conspiracy theorists and right wing radicals.

But the science denial mindset was widespread among conservatives and existed long before Trump.

Harking back to high school chemistry, I think that Trump is best classified as "catalyst" rather than "reagent."
 
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BlueMoonAcrossThePond said:
I grew up in a very conservative household. My father, son of a Missouri farmer, staunch lifelong conservative, and a PhD mathematician, was stubbornly anti-fact. He doubted medical opinion - and lost his teeth due to his dismissal of the efficacy of flossing - he doubted scientific findings on the danger of pollution and took up the side of industry - he doubted medical research outlining the dangers of smoking and its effects, including second hand smoke; and so on.

I think that science denial was widespread among the Right way before Trump as evinced by my father - Trump and the support he received from Fox and other right-leaning outlets simply made science denial socially acceptable if not admired. And from there, the floodgates of lunacy opened wide. The Right's "tent" of acceptable views burgeoned, to include conspiracy theorists and right wing radicals.

But the science denial mindset was widespread among conservatives and existed long before Trump.
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Among an aspect of conservatives I believe this is true. But that "aspect" is now the central narrative. It's now core. It's definitional. I don't think that was the case under the Bushes, nor Reagan, nor Nixon.
 
BlueMoonAcrossThePond said:
As terrible as Covid is, so help me, I can't help but see a silver lining. Deaths and near deaths due to COVIDmust have served as a wakeup call to those on the Right. Snap out of it! - scientists are almost always correct, and we'd do best to follow their guidance.

Yet, even in the face of death of loved ones, and near death experiences of self... the Right's toxic individualism and science denial remains unexpectedly strong.

Unfortunately, it may take a black death-level catastrophe to wake the science deniers up.
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As long as enough of them have been naturally selected out of the species through their own stupidity...
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Among an aspect of conservatives I believe this is true. But that "aspect" is now the central narrative. It's now core. It's definitional. I don't think that was the case under the Bushes, nor Reagan, nor Nixon.
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Another analogy...

The percentage of the populace who are gay, bisexual or who identify with the gender opposite their birth certificate is almost certainly the same now as it was, say 50 years ago. And yet the freedom to express sexual and gender orientation is far, far higher now than in the past.

So too science denial. Science denial has existed for decades in the US, but was socially repressed. The Right dislikes science - because it's intellectual, it takes effort to comprehend, and most of all because it's inconvenient.

Steve Bannon - hate the guy - is genius for recognizing precise this. That a huge, untapped anti-science, anti-government, anti-liberal sentiment had been brewing in rural America for decades - he helped Trump channel this force into a successful run for President.

Trump is mostly catalyst - not reagent.
 
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