Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Iran War. When.

2021
3
6%
2022-2025
15
28%
2026-2030
7
13%
2031-2040
3
6%
2041-2050
0
No votes
Never
25
47%
 
Total votes: 53

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Mischief Maker
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Mischief Maker »

Fuck me, Chapo Trap House is giving props to Biden for not backing down on the withdrawl.

Watch out for flying pigs!
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Sengoku Strider wrote:All that being said, I fully believe they'd be pissed at Trump if/when the same thing happened under his watch.
Agreed with everything up to this point. Totally disagree here though. They'd have been delighted with the withdrawal and would've brushed aside the deaths as acceptable losses. What they'd be angered about most likely was allowing more refugees into the country, if anything.

Case in point, his voters forgave him for the Yakla raid that did not follow standard, established approval procedures, and was very obviously a hurried, foolhardy attempt at scoring a quick military victory so that Trump could make himself look like a strongman. With the raid ending up as a disaster, Trump et al swung between claiming it as a great success, blaming the military, and so on until it was forgotten in the news by the next idiotic thing he did. He was always bitter about Osama bin Laden finally being found and killed while Obama was in power and wanted victories he could claim credit for to boast about. Just look at him now talking out his ass about Osama bin Laden wasn't even a very big deal. The insanity of this is that Trump is very obviously inept, insecure, and has an inferiority complex, yet a large media campaign manages to keep convincing his voters how wonderful he is.
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Sengoku Strider wrote:All that being said, I fully believe they'd be pissed at Trump if/when the same thing happened under his watch.
Agreed with everything up to this point. Totally disagree here though. They'd have been delighted with the withdrawal and would've brushed aside the deaths as acceptable losses. What they'd be angered about most likely was allowing more refugees into the country, if anything.

Case in point, his voters forgave him for the Yakla raid that did not follow standard, established approval procedures, and was very obviously a hurried, foolhardy attempt at scoring a quick military victory so that Trump could make himself look like a strongman. With the raid ending up as a disaster, Trump et al swung between claiming it as a great success, blaming the military, and so on until it was forgotten in the news by the next idiotic thing he did. He was always bitter about Osama bin Laden finally being found and killed while Obama was in power and wanted victories he could claim credit for to boast about. Just look at him now talking out his ass about Osama bin Laden wasn't even a very big deal. The insanity of this is that Trump is very obviously inept, insecure, and has an inferiority complex, yet a large media campaign manages to keep convincing his voters how wonderful he is.
You could well be right, I was thinking that I'd seen them turn on him a few times already, but most of those have been when he was out of office and off Twitter. The one difference between this scenario and Yakla is that it wasn't an international embarrassment to them. This is climbing-onto-the-helicopter-from-the-Saigon-embassy-roof times a lot, and the process still isn't over. People falling off your planes as they cling in fear was about as bad as optics get.

He'd also be in his 2nd term, and running real low on favours he'd have left to hand out. That media machine wouldn't be quite so vociferous in their support. Especially because the people behind it know that in the back of his mind the hamster wheels were always turning towards how to grift a third term, something they likely didn't want because it removes too many of the levers of power they do have in place.

The thing about these voters and the military is that a lot of those recruits - probably most - are coming out of their communities. So trying to turn around and blame the army tends to be a non-starter. Especially when you're the guy who's put a lot of the leadership in place personally, circumventing senate confirmation all the while. And you're the guy who negotiated the pullout. And you're the guy who's been president through the whole process of the Taliban dismantling your country's proxy regime right under your nose without you noticing.

For sure, fingers would be pointed at 8 years of Obama and loser Joe Biden and the 2012 pullout aim and it put Trump in an impossible situation blah blah. But none of these guys are teflon, and I always circle back to the fact that the reason Trump got the nomination over any establishment candidate was because Republican voters hate their party at the federal level to begin with.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Honestly, I can't even think of a single meaningful time his adoring crowds of fans and voters have turned on him viciously aside from recently when he half-assedly suggested they should get the vaccine, then immediately backpedaled when he got booed. If you can think of anything else, remind me, because the whole nightmare's a big blur at this point.

A handful of senators turned on him over the course of his reign of terror, but were immediately made into party pariahs (Mitt Romney during the 1st impeachment, Liz Cheney during the 2nd) and despite an attempted armed insurrection on the capitol that threatened the country and its democracy, the GOP stuck to licking the boots of Trump and his army of imbeciles. As he essentially got away from both impeachments without any real consequences, I don't see those as meaningful.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by GaijinPunch »

Kaley McEneighny (sp fucked I know) went on Fox News and said, "with Trump you didn't have crisis on top of crisis week after week". Apparently she has the kind of DMT that doesn't wear off.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

Well, everything that happened back when he was in office was obviously the Deep State trying to make him look bad.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:Honestly, I can't even think of a single meaningful time his adoring crowds of fans and voters have turned on him viciously aside from recently when he half-assedly suggested they should get the vaccine, then immediately backpedaled when he got booed. If you can think of anything else, remind me, because the whole nightmare's a big blur at this point.
His adoring crowds have shrunk somewhat, which is why he's holding his rallies in distinctly off-brand locations like the prestigious York Family Farms in Cullman, Alabama (pop.18,213). A bunch of them turned around and walked out of his first post-presidency rally when he started talking about 2024 and they suddenly realized there wasn't going to be a grand reveal that he's the secret president or it was officially boogaloo time.

Mainly, the vaxx stuff and the amount of involvement he has with die jüden is where I see the most negative "we can't trust him" comments.

But really I said that because after watching them turn on cowboy hero president Dubya, I don't think anyone or anything is truly teflon to them:

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GaijinPunch wrote:Kaley McEneighny (sp fucked I know) went on Fox News and said, "with Trump you didn't have crisis on top of crisis week after week". Apparently she has the kind of DMT that doesn't wear off.
The trick is getting all the calcium deposits off.

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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

Sengoku Strider wrote:But really I said that because after watching them turn on cowboy hero president Dubya, I don't think anyone or anything is truly teflon to them:
The one thing they - and, crucially, their "moderate" comrades in arms - will never turn their backs on is whoever or whatever pushes the shamelessness envelope even further and gives them none-too-tacit permission to behave even worse.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

The media stuff on Biden is such a blatant example of how consent is constantly being manufactured. Withdrawing from Afghanistan is what the public wants, and it's what the Pentagon (aka, the spooky deep state) wanted too. But such a positive thing is painted like he's garbage, as if the last 20 years of death and misery didn't happen. As if he told the generals "pull out, but do it badly" while president Republican would have said "pull out, but do it good." (Obviously the actual blame for any fuckups would lie at the military's officers' feet, but we're not allowed to criticize anyone in a military uniform, in our fascist hellhole of a country. GD, total "Baghdad Bob" moment..)

They just have this big switch they can flip between DEM prez and GOP prez at will, and nothing else really matters. Good 'ole television.

Came across this old C-SPAN video from over seventeen years ago. About the use of language in public thought. It's hilarious how nothing whatsoever has changed - the funniest part was at the end when he was hopeful that the democrats would "figure out" how to talk and shake off their "wonkiness". Forgivable at the time, sure. It was only ~twenty years into this exercise. After over forty years, if you think the so-called "smart" people can't figure out how to put words together for TV or how to assemble an effective counter-media empire, you're lying to yourself. They're paid to lose.

Him bringing up Frank Luntz, who's an instrumental figure in building modern conservative spin, also reminds us of that 2015 classic moment: Lutz is on the Nightly Show. The host Larry remarks he thinks someone who tells the truth can't win. He asks the audience if they think Bernie can win, they scream "NO!!!" Luntz goes "woah wait a minute" and asks the audience if it's between Hillary and Bernie, which do they prefer. Hillary? A couple claps. Bernie? Audience roars in approval. Luntz turns to Larry and says "that's why your side is fucked."

To say Luntz has "won" is an understatement. To "win" implies there was ever a fight, and if there ever was a fight, it was like a MMA fight between an infant and Mike Tyson. Everything in the mind palace realm of tv and radio is within the framing of capitalist and fascist world views. We think the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were "mistakes" in hindsight. In a similar fashion to how exterminating the natives here was "bad". Will either of those stop the next war? Of course not.

The morons who've given the operation of their brains over to zillionaires will howl with approval at the next fresh and exciting blood-letting. Any hippy that tries to give everyone healthcare instead will be destroyed.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BulletMagnet wrote:The one thing they - and, crucially, their "moderate" comrades in arms - will never turn their backs on is whoever or whatever pushes the shamelessness envelope even further and gives them none-too-tacit permission to behave even worse.
I don't think that's it. The fundamental premise of conservatism is to maintain social norms and continuity with history and tradition. Or at least, whatever perception of those things the present moment necessitates.

Trumpism - if it qualifies as an ism - is a reactionary movement against liberal tone policing and the sense that they've been rejected by the intelligentsia. It's not that they don't want to keep rude behaviour out of discourse, it's that they hate how much of the general opprobrium is directed towards them. That Trump is bullish enough to smash headfirst through all that while others apologize and kowtow, that he annoys liberals to no end, is a lot of what makes him a hero to them.

I think that what it's always come down to is their own status anxiety, and who they see as capable of delivering on soothing that. That's democratic politics in a nutshell, really.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

You're certainly correct that the right has positioned itself as the "guardian of decency" at times in the past (though I'm not sure there was ever a time they weren't gleefully willing to commit the most brutal of atrocities in the name of preserving said "decency"), but as you note at the moment that's precisely, and very openly, the opposite of what they want, from the bottom straight on up; as I put it in the aftermath of the January 6th riot, even those who might not have been outright determined to commit an insurrection were very much there to break shit and take selfies, and poll after poll shows strong support all across the conservative spectrum for their "cause", and almost as much approval of their methods.

The key questions are 1) How much of a difference is there, really, between authoritarianism in the name of "order" and authoritarianism in the name of "upheaval", at the end of the day, and 2) How severe/persistent a shift (in tone, if nothing else) is it, this time around. I imagine you can probably guess my position on both of those.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

The status quo has always been genocide and looting, so, eh, the past is always white-washed. As is the present. And future.
is a reactionary movement against liberal tone policing and the sense that they've been rejected by the intelligentsia. It's not that they don't want to keep rude behaviour out of discourse, it's that they hate how much of the general opprobrium is directed towards them.
It is pretty sad it's really as simple as that, but only wonk losers make things needlessly complex. "Rich snobs on TV hurt their feelings so they don't trust them, and want to hurt them back." Yeah, that's all it was or ever will be. We live in TV.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Interesting. I get a full tear jerker profile of every dead American from a bomb in Afghanistan. Can I get a full profile for every American that dies because of our inefficient health care system? How about a profile of every dead person in Ethiopia (a place that America isn't currently using for pearl clutching and exploiting death for purely cynical political purposes). If we weren't pulling out, would these profiles be all over my front page?????? ????? Eleven people died last year and I never heard shit.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Texas is at trying to police women's reproductive rights. It reminds me of an article from two decades ago talking about how anti-choice crusaders are massive hypocrites: https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-on ... -abortion/
“We have anti-choice women in for abortions all the time. Many of them are just naive and ignorant until they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Many of them are not malicious. They just haven’t given it the proper amount of thought until it completely affects them. They can be judgmental about their friends, family, and other women. Then suddenly they become pregnant. Suddenly they see the truth. That it should only be their own choice. Unfortunately, many also think that somehow they are different than everyone else and they deserve to have an abortion, while no one else does.” (Physician, Washington State)
The same thing happens with antivaxxers who flood the hospitals when they're dying suddenly regretting not getting the vaccine. How do we deal with large groups of people who lack the imagination or empathy to be considerate of the situations of other people? It's really frustrating dealing with people who take a really poorly thought-out stance on an issue only to change it the moment their stance personally inconveniences them. They have absolutely no regard for the damage they're doing to everyone else because they literally do not seem to have the capacity to imagine their actions impact others. How do you teach people empathy, and that it's an important and useful thing to have?
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:How do you teach people empathy, and that it's an important and useful thing to have?
When the inherent attitude is akin to the bit you quoted...
Unfortunately, many also think that somehow they are different than everyone else and they deserve to have an abortion, while no one else does.
...you're wasting your time trying to "teach" them anything. The problem is not a lack of knowledge/exposure to empathy, but a very conscious and deliberate rejection of it.

On a separate note, they are not going to learn.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:How do you teach people empathy, and that it's an important and useful thing to have?
We (well, I) have mentioned a lot of times here this stuff is developmental - the person you'll ever be is solidified around the time you're six years old. Stuff like Sesame Street and Mr.Rogers are absolutely critical. This old video of Rogers testifying to the senate to lobby for public funds is perfectly illustrative of what they're for. It isn't to how to teach kids numbers, letters, colors or how to sing evil songs that never end (my friend)... no, it's to try to create a stable psychological and emotional base in kids. The most important message: Don't be afraid.

It's the absolute antithesis of the messages we're bombarded with elsewhere, which is "be hella afraid". The political theater is agush with that toxic crap: there isn't even a single human being on the other side to have a conversation with, just objects of hatred to vent uselessly toward. They're not enemies, they're symbiotic.

The rightwing, because it's paid to win, understands all these basic truths. You advertise to children, that's how you keep a franchise alive, that's how you have loyal customers for life. No war but culture war. And actual war. (But, that one's not visible in our mind palaces except when they need to pump up consent for another one.)

How do you make a stranger a better person? You buy a tv station and whisper into their ear all day long.

Practically, all you can work on is people you actually know and care about. It's paternalistic to give preachy tirades, but simple neutral observations that poke holes in one's model of reality can make a little traction over time. (For example, noting that Biden is being hammered in the media for doing what literally everyone, including blood gurgling pentagon ghouls, wanted him to do on Afghanistan.)

A few weeks ago I watched this story a comrade had of getting away from the alt-right. The most surprising thing to me was that someone so smart could have gotten so wrapped in anti-blue hair hysteria. All because some youtubers he liked started preaching it. (This also supports the idea that becoming a gutter priest on youtube is not completely worthless.)

Anyway, I feel like a core necessity to being a good preacher is legitimately caring about the needs of the people you're talking to (or at least being smart enough to fake it.) and gently nudging them toward healthier high-level thoughts, rather than viewing every little issue as a football game to score points in. A hero slash god-complex is stupid (we're doomed after all), but humans are having poison poured into their ears from the high priests on TV all day. Neutralizing even a single drop is a colossal feat and worthy of 27 football points.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Mischief Maker »

BryanM wrote:A few weeks ago I watched this story a comrade had of getting away from the alt-right. The most surprising thing to me was that someone so smart could have gotten so wrapped in anti-blue hair hysteria.

All because some youtubers he liked started preaching it.
https://twitter.com/highprogressive/sta ... 1300566017
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Yeah, would have been great if we had a time machine to keep Clinton's donors from taking over the party and you wouldn't have had to deal with that shit. (Though the mechanism you'd need to use to prevent it wouldn't have been an election. Elaborate media-jamming with your magical sci-fi powers, minimum.) Someone with some human empathy could have been on the court instead.

But we're in the apocalypse now and there's nothing but blood and spectacle here on out.

_____

Elections are really incredibly stupid. Putting faith in some middle-man to do what you want to do, instead of just pushing the button yourself. When it's down to personality, who you like and trust, of course it's trivial to keep it flipping back and forth between anything 50/50 of the time, as our overlords prefer.

Mike Gravel made advocating his idea of how to fix that fundamental flaw his life's work: he believed that direct democracy would be ideal. As has been pointed out constantly, we have the worst of all possible systems, even sortition would have been better than this.

If you want a religion, I personally recommend techno-optimism. The magic CO2 vacuum is very unrealistic, but it's less unrealistic than thinking we're going to give up cars before we run out of gas.

(What I personally hate the most about elections is how it turns everyone into a bumper sticker. Instead of talking about ways the world could, in your opinion, be better, it's this nonstop gibberish of "VOTE X! Fuck Y!" because there's always an election and it's always the most important one in your life.)

(There was a little flashback recently on that "bernie's mittens" meme, and how much liberals hate the man and were infuriated that him just sitting in a chair went viral during their celebration party instead of Michelle's $20,000 dress or whatever.)
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BryanM wrote:What I personally hate the most about elections is how it turns everyone into a bumper sticker. Instead of talking about ways the world could, in your opinion, be better, it's this nonstop gibberish of "VOTE X! Fuck Y!"
It's an art form. One which achieves its most sublime expression when someone manages to work in Chewbacca.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by drauch »

Belovod country! Never seen the Trump "keep on truckin'" before. VERY, very beautiful.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BELOVOD COUNTRY sounds like the enemy side in a Langrisser game Image (almost as good as CYBER VAWG, the antagonist of every PCE stg ever)
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

A fun fact or two for my fellow citizens of the USA:
As of March, there were 724 billionaires in the US with a collective net worth back of $4.4 trillion. With the soaring stock market, their wealth is even greater today. Those 724 billionaires could each keep $1 billion for themselves and still fund the entire $3.5 trillion for [...] the 330 million people of the United States.
So yeah, we could fully fund the Dems' entire 10-year spending package if we were willing to tell a few hundred people "okay, you can still be billionaires, just not multi-billionaires. I know it'll be tough, but think of the folks scraping by on fortunes of a mere 900 million; we just didn't have the heart to ask any of them to pay up; we'll just have to raise the retirement age again instead."

What continues to piss me off to no end is the article's utterly inexplicable insistence that Manchin and other "centrists" somehow just don't understand what they're dealing with here: just to use Manchin as an example, when he was governor he was also ALEC's West Virginia chair and is still proudly listed on the group's website (for non-Americans who may not be aware, ALEC is an organization which arranges meetings where corporations literally hand legislation they themselves have drafted to members of Congress for the latter to pass; neither the press nor the public is permitted to observe any of the goings-on. And no, I have no fucking idea how this is legal, either).

"Moderate your stance" and support "education initiatives" and "reach across the aisle" to the populists all you want. They know exactly what they're doing, they are not taking their stance in good faith, and they are not going to learn.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

BulletMagnet wrote:They know exactly what they're doing, they are not taking their stance in good faith, and they are not going to learn.
You know, you're talking about quash here. And he dropped Trump like a hot potato after the Syria missile strike.

Of course there are disingenuous shitheads all over the place. Try to attack the bullshit (in a calm, soothing voice like a cult leader), and try not to make things personal. If all of X is awful and you hate them and they're irredeemable, what good does obsessing over them do?

You can't control the actions of others, you can only control your own. The democrats are your party, and if they're shit, which they are unless you're making six+ figures and living in heaven, you should be spending most of your time making them better by pushing these corporate goons out. Which I'm sure you did in 2016+2020 by voting for Sanders in the primary as all the other anti-doomers at the time did. (Or if you simply believe we should raise taxes on the wealthy or have universal healthcare. If you say you want those things, but did not actually vote for them the only time they were made available, then you don't actually want those things. They're just an aesthetic cudgel to feel good about yourself, not an actual goal to be achieved in the real world.)

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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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BryanM wrote:You know, you're talking about quash here.
Actually I'm not, that's a completely different kettle of fish; there are plenty of adjectives to apply to his ilk, but "moderate" is not among them. Off to the side, I would still be incredibly surprised if quash didn't pull the lever for Trump in 2020.
If all of X is awful and you hate them and they're irredeemable, what good does obsessing over them do?
What I'm obsessing over is not so much "them" but the people who keep insisting that the only reason "they" are continuing to vote against their own (and almost everybody's) interests is that we haven't been nice enough to them; to be perfectly frank it's sickeningly reminiscent of the notion that the wealthy corporatists will finally start raising wages if we would only lower their taxes yet again, and smile wider this time. They've made it abundantly clear, for decades, what their M.O. is and always will be, and that anyone who still buys that line at this point is nothing short of delusional.

Remember, in 2020 Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, and the GOP greatly outperformed expectations down-ballot; not only has there been zero pushback from the people who are supposed to be "persuadable" when presented with, say, stolen Supreme Court seats, but they are increasingly determined to reward the people doing it. You can theorize however you want as to their motivations (you're already quite familiar with my take), but what you can't argue is that despite countless and costly efforts to "meet them in the middle" going back countless years they have never missed an opportunity to spit in the eyes of those reaching out.

To all appearances, the only way to circumvent their unchanging endgame is to outpace them, give them what they actually need once in office, and hope they eventually pretend they've always supported such measures even as they raise hell over whatever follows suit (and, as you note, even then the farthest they will allow us to go is a "believer in bipartisanship" like Biden) - which is why, in the face of losing the White House, the right's strategy is not to "moderate" themselves (why should they, when they've yet to suffer even minimal consequences from "swing" voters for their tireless charge towards out-and-out authoritarianism?), but to suppress less convenient votes. And once again, to all appearances, the centrists are all for it.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by orange808 »

Guinea: Ebola, Coronavirus, poverty, rape, and constant war. Will you save them, too? Why not? Do they mattter? Will you invade them and install a hundred year occupation? What about their neighbors? Why won't you "fix" it? Why? Why? Why not? :-)

The entire bullshit narrative falls apart really fast, doesn't it? We can keep going. We can add nation after nation. We can pile the "to do" list high! The media needs to shut up about Afghanistan or explain why people in Afghanistan deserve things more than people in Guinea. They can't, because it's bullshit.

Women suffering is the new fun Afghanistan guilt trip. Well, here's this:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/sto ... =113980654

It's an old story, but nothing has changed. We know about it and have known about it. We don't do shit. So, don't guilt trip me. You can bet that the current lawless "transition" is unleashing a new wave of rape and continued corruption in Guinea. Afghanistan is nothing but a cynical ploy for power. Republicans don't care about people. And, the righties can stick the fake feminism guilt trip up their asses.
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Hoagtech wrote:And I do believe anyone can compete against Goliaths and I’ll send you a PM for personal proof in about a month after my NDA expires..
My dude! It's been over a month now, and we're all waiting with baited breath; in an era where 4 out of 5 new businesses don't manage to last 5 years, this could change everything, so don't make us wait, tell us how you've solved anti-competitive corporate consolidation!

...oh gee, maybe he's being shy, the modest little rascal. Bryan, has he PMed you yet?
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BryanM
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BryanM »

Nothing. But I can't say it was anything that lingered in my mind. I thought he was just trying to seem cool on the internet, a sentiment I can sympathize with. A very Tomoko-chan kind of thing.

_____

Religious ad-hoc, just-so thinking is something I can't tolerate when talking to people in real life anymore. It's like that thing orange and I tend to do: old man yells at TV. Except the TV is made of meat.

It'd be more effective to cut the poison off at its source, but so far all I can find about media/culture jamming is "be an annoying shit". And I was already an annoying shit to begin with, so that isn't very helpful...

There are people way better at it than I ever could be anyway...
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BulletMagnet
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by BulletMagnet »

BryanM wrote:But I can't say it was anything that lingered in my mind.
Oh, quite the opposite here: I absolutely want to hear this.
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BryanM wrote:Religious ad-hoc, just-so thinking is something I can't tolerate when talking to people in real life anymore. It's like that thing orange and I tend to do: old man yells at TV. Except the TV is made of meat.

It'd be more effective to cut the poison off at its source, but so far all I can find about media/culture jamming is "be an annoying shit". And I was already an annoying shit to begin with, so that isn't very helpful...
I mean, there's levels to this shit. There are plenty of people for whom religion is a positive force in their lives, providing community and spurring them to perform charitable acts for those who largely go otherwise ignored by society. Thinking back to growing up, the only people I knew who were doing any regular volunteering activities for anything other than a resume entry were the church kids. There's a church on the corner near my place. They offer a food bank every Thursday. Last year at peak pandemic, the line stretched so far down the road it's end was literally out of view. There's a lot of people who made it through because those people gave up their own time & resources to help them.

...And then there's this.

Image
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Mischief Maker
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Re: Prelude to the Apocalypse

Post by Mischief Maker »

Sengoku Strider wrote:Image
Spoiler
Image
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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