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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Rob
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Rob »

Is this the epitaph for the Bernie dream?
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Rob
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Rob »

Can I get an economist to weigh in on this one?

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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

It's all they got - the brains of TV serfs.

It's too bad he has to win overwhelmingly in the primary to actually win.
Last edited by BryanM on Wed Oct 09, 2019 6:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

Puppies are cute.
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

That unz website called all BLM activists homosexuals in an article about how one of them was murdered and set on fire in his car. Classy stuff.
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Ed Oscuro »

hey guyz, remember when quash told us Trump loved The Troops, or when austere told us Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Syria

that's it, that's the entire joke
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BulletMagnet
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BulletMagnet »

Rob wrote:Can I get an economist to weigh in on this one?
I'm not an economist, but I have read some of Krugman's musings beyond this tweet, and his overall gist seems to be not that debt is never a bad thing, but that conservatives' boilerplate complaints about it are almost without exception 1) Situational, i.e. their attitude about Obama's spending vs. Bush's or Trump's, 2) Self-serving, i.e. always used as justification to make the rich richer and/or everyone else poorer, and 3) Fly in the face of Economics 101, i.e. their insistence on austerity during downturns as opposed to booms. Again, I don't personally know enough about economics to comment in depth, though you've certainly heard me jeer enough times at upper-end tax cuts will totally pay for themselves...this time, for realsies! to know I'm skeptical of the reactionary line on such matters, and I'm quite convinced you don't need a degree to justify that much.

As for the "money we owe to ourselves" item from the tweet, a quick Google search turned this up, among many others...as a bonus, feel free to check out the "US Debt to China" subheading on that site as well, and have a good laugh at the "China will demand payment for the debt it holds and crash the economy any day now" mantra and those who continue to repeat it.

I honestly have no idea what that Wiesenthal guy is talking about when he somehow takes "debt doesn't need to be an overriding concern above all others when it's not adversely affecting investment (which it didn't do during Obama's term and still isn't doing during Trump's...particularly funny since Trump openly crows about how his trillion-dollar addition to the debt has been so great for the markets)" and turns that into "so he's actually saying our kids would be better off if we were all unemployed". :?:
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Specineff
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Specineff »

Ed Oscuro wrote:hey guyz, remember when quash told us Trump loved The Troops, or when austere told us Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Syria
As a citizen of Mexico, I'm still wondering how much money I'll be required to send to the U.S. treasury because my country was totally supposed to pay for that big, beautiful wall. And especially since I've been getting welfare, unemployment, student assistance, medicare, VA access, fishing licenses and all other sort of benefits all this time, just by flashing my Illegal Alien Card at every government office I can take advantage of.

Heck, here's the mailing address of the Mexican presidency, so that they can send the invoice already. Get on it already, cabrones:

C/O: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, President Of Mexico.
Calle Parque Lira S/N. Bosque de Chapultepec, sector 1.
Mexico City, Mexico. 11850

Four more years of this farce is starting to sound delightful.
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BulletMagnet
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BulletMagnet »

Specineff wrote:As a citizen of Mexico, I'm still wondering how much money I'll be required to send to the U.S. treasury because my country was totally supposed to pay for that big, beautiful wall.
By one accounting Mexico is the wall.
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Specineff
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Specineff »

Yeah. Good thing that has made smugglers and tunnels disappear overnight, huh?
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

Specineff wrote:And especially since I've been getting welfare, unemployment, student assistance, medicare, VA access, fishing licenses and all other sort of benefits all this time, just by flashing my Illegal Alien Card at every government office I can take advantage of.
I renounced my citizenship so I could get in on all these sweet welfare programs we give away to illegal humans who are illegal, but when I went to the DHS office the guy on the other side of the speaker said "I'm sorry sir, this is an Arby's."
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Rob
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Rob »

Specineff wrote:every government office I can take advantage of.
Hate to interrupt the hilarious gag about services not being received, as if it is all a phantom concern of the most slack-jawed American rube, but this does seem to be the observable pattern of behavior. Once something to abuse is discovered and word of it has spread, the pellet dispenser gets smashed. Some welfare figures from Cuban immigrant (probably not a Klansman) Jorge Borjas:

Image

In addition to neon-flashing welfare, there is every other costly benefit of living in a functional society. K12 education, for instance, costs over $100,000 in California and $200,000 in New York per student. Who is paying for it? Further, when you look at the results of this expensive education, do you think there will ever be a return on investment?

Image

There are things far more important than these expenses, though.
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Rob
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Rob »

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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

Seriously there's an edit button
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Rob
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Rob »

And there's an unemployment office. I'm not going to edit a 4 day old post to talk about something that happened today.
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

The fund raiser she's holding tomorrow... the deadline to get on the ballot coming up in a few weeks.... the speculation that She is running again... is a bit scary..

The debates are marginally watchable if you do it through a filter. I'm going to try out Taibbi's show for it tonight. Not as boisterous as some, not as rabidly contemptuous of the media as I am, but, it's something different.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Mischief Maker »

Majority Report is my go-to.

Dunno about Taibbi, the big thing he's promising is drinking games, and the main reason I can't stand Chapo's commentaries is they (Matt) get too drunk toward the end and it all devolves into incoherent yelling.
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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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

Mmmm, but can you say you've watched/participated in a political debate if you're not incoherently yelling by the end of it?

The internet is a magical place. If you yell at the TV by yourself, you're a lunatic. But if you do it with 300 friends, why, you're part of a community.

(I guess that's similar to drinking - if you get drunk in a social setting you're a party animal and that's rad. But if you get drunk alone you're an alcoholic and that's sad.)
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Mischief Maker
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Mischief Maker »

Thanks for giving two loser candidates more speaking time than Sanders, CNN:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... -time.html

God knows I was on the edge of my seat waiting to hear what these two single-digit losers had to say so much more than the guy who dominated last quarter's fundraising entirely without corporate cash.
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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emphatic
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by emphatic »

How's that impeachment coming? :lol:
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Specineff
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Specineff »

Probably much sooner than the big beautiful wall that Mexico is totally paying for.
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

It's going to be such a huge waste of everybody's time. Politics-as-sports at its finest. Watching pointless click-bait videos by Cenk about the walls closing in will be all we have left.

Nixon wasn't going to get thrown out because of what he did, he was gonna get thrown out because public pressure was such that senators would have lost their jobs if they didn't follow through with it.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Mischief Maker »

Well I think that is what's going on. Chuck 'n Nancy derped out on the Mueller report despite it laying clear grounds to impeach, ostensibly because centrist dithering would protect the purple district dems. The purples went home to their town halls and the democratic electorate shockingly breathed fire at them for derping out on impeachment because the blue wave of 2018 was all about stopping Trump. So they went back to Chuck and Nancy and said, "If we don't impeach, I'm gonna lose my job!"

Make no mistake, all this focus on Hunter is bad for Biden which is good for us. The more the Trump administration is on the defensive this final year, the less damage they can manage to cause. And remember that while all nine Benghazi hearings "failed," they created the email scandal that was the straw that broke Hillary's back and gave republicans control of the federal judiciary thanks to their big "waste of time."

Sometimes it's worth fighting even if you "lose" for the side benefits.
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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maximo310
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by maximo310 »

https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status ... 0500282368

The last couple of days have been weird, in between this ridic letter & trying to force a photo-op between a British couple & the lady who ran over & killed their son (the wife of a US diplomat)
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BulletMagnet
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BulletMagnet »

Not to mention the Attorney General all but declaring non-religious people not only unsuited for democracy but deliberate, calculated enemies of it, because of course we use the time we should be spending in church to plot against the Republic. :lol: If I read another pearl-clutching Faith Under Assault op-ed, especially from a self-styled "moderate", I'm going to fucking scream.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by Mischief Maker »

No mystery there, Trump's base are the evangelicals.
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: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

I have a hypothesis that a large portion of Trump's "base" may very well be into libertarian or anarchist style "burn the government down" isolationist values and see the genuine chaos and deaths being caused by him as mere cathartic entertainment as opposed to recognizing it as a very real and terrifying attack on their own republic from within.
BulletMagnet wrote:Not to mention the Attorney General all but declaring non-religious people not only unsuited for democracy but deliberate, calculated enemies of it,
At least they're being intellectually honest when they say they believe atheists are literally evil. I can respect the religious right when they're being openly, vehemently awful in defense of their beliefs (where the world can see them for what they are) as opposed to pretending they're morally pure while downplaying the abhorrent tenets proscribed by their religion, or pretending that Islam's "death penalty for apostates" is entirely removed from Christianity when we've seen plenty of similar atrocities from various Christian sects such as Catholicism throughout history.

Also tied to the religious right's "secularism is evil" thing is America's whole unwillingness to look to other better, more functioning countries (such as ones where school shootings aren't a daily fucking occurrence) to try and change things to better emulate them. There are plenty of countries such as Nordic model countries with general policies for healthcare and schooling that generally are far better functioning and result in much happier social societies than America is.

Also plurality voting, which both the USA and Canada use, frankly sucks and consistently manages to elect bad leaders, which switching to Score Voting (also known as Range Voting) would go a long way to fixing, since it would eliminate the need to "strategically" vote due to similar candidates running for election hurting each others' chances vs a completely different candidate (this phenomenon is known as "candidate cloning"). https://rangevoting.org

Sadly election reform is probably a long way off for both Canada and the USA. Canadians thought they elected a leader who promised electoral reform, but he ended up being a spineless sack of shit who did exactly what the cynics surmised, and ditched the electoral reform promise as soon as he gained power.
Last edited by BareKnuckleRoo on Fri Oct 18, 2019 5:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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JBC
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by JBC »

Nah, we're just tired of weirdos.
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BryanM
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BryanM »

Dehumanization and inflicting pain on outgroups is the entire point of the party. You remember all those slasher flicks in the 80's where Ronald Reagan or his wife murder the shit out of transgressors (aka, people enjoying life).

The subgroup that loves cops when they're local but hates cops when they're higher on the food chain are interesting examples. The CIA and the local PD all serve the same power bloc, the only real difference is the PD might include an uncle while the CIA is a spooky distant institution made up of perceived elites. Classic in/out group stuff.

This sort of thing is why Warren does poorly in the general while Sanders manages the bare minimum of "imaginary generic democrat". The imaginary generic democrat always being far better than the republican with a D next to its name slime monster that invariably wins the nomination.

... I think it's really gross how they changed Jake from the Evil Dead Musical into a gross caricature in the later versions..
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: 2020 (D) Presidential Primary

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

8BA wrote:Nah, we're just tired of weirdos.
I'm pretty sure millionaires who crash charity events they didn't donate to, in order to pretend they did, are pretty fucking weird, right?
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