Prelude to the Apocalypse

[quash]

remarkably communist ideal of a stateless society

Can't tell if serious.

Also: Do we have net immigration from Mexico, or net emigration to Mexico? Have you figured out the numbers on that yet, or do you still think it's 1992?

Currently we have a net emigration, but there are also more countries than Mexico we have to worry about.

It was abortion that was brought up as a thing rich people do to dodge taking responsibility for their actions, and you jump right into another rant on men taking our jobs and women. Jesus...

I was just pointing out how well meaning people on either side can be duped into protecting the upper class. Painting the elites' agenda as anti-elitist seems to work wonders.

Also, don't take abortion lightly. It's one of the few things I'll unequivocally agree with the Democrats on because it has kept our population in check. Seriously, just look at how many are performed each year.

[BryanM]

Happy shoe day, everyone.

[Mischief Maker]

My main beef with you, is that you mostly quote Breitbart as your source.

Well that's interesting. quash, you've said before that you don't trust the Washington Post because it's owned by Jeff Bezos.

So why do you trust Rebekah Mercer? Why is she more trustworthy than Bezos?

[quash]

Because Bezos is in with the deep state. Amazon may not have started that way like Google did, but once they secured that contract with the CIA it was all downhill from there.

Besides their profits, that is. But you have to ask: why did the CIA save what was at that point a struggling business?

Breitbart certainly has an agenda, as does every media outlet, but they're not a de-facto branch of the intelligence community, at least.

[BulletMagnet]

It just keeps getting better.

[quash]

MediaMatters may know what's turning the frogs gay, but can they see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

[Mischief Maker]

If we're going to be having fun with Alex Jones...

[BryanM]

It just keeps getting better.

More sane and plausible than the complete insanity of the conspiracy theory that Mrs.Clinton is unpopular on the internet because of Russia.

Tim Kaine has currently gone on record as opposing the expansion of Medicare, and has formally endorsed Donald Trump for president for forever.

Spoiler

And to think they welcomed the old man to the primary at first, happy that they could use him as a prop to pretend the coronation was democratic. How things change.

[Mischief Maker]

Tim Kaine

Who?

[BryanM]

Tim Kaine

Who?

Another in the long list of things to be thankful to Trump for, on this gloomy Thanksgiving : /

[quash]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-san ... 1505307600

The 96-page bill offers no mechanisms to pay for the plan, which is expected to cost the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

JUST

[Rob]

The Revolution ain't free.

[Mischief Maker]

Oh COME ON you guys!

You seriously believe this is a starry-eyed honest attempt by Sanders to pass this specific bill, which he totally expects Trump to sign into law? Even when he was on the news last week saying this bill isn't going to pass right now? Every blunder by Trump is secretly a 3-dimensional chess move, but this bill serves no political purpose beyond getting passed? How is playing dumb for a political point an alpha move?

A full third of the Senate Democratic caucus was behind Medicare for All, something Hillary said to a crowd one short year ago was "NEVER! GONNA! HAPPEN!" Now if you want to be a serious contender for the Dem nomination in 2020, you MUST support universal health insurance. The Overton Window has shifted a crack, and what a breath of fresh air! There just might be a goddamn light at the end of this nightmare tunnel.

[BryanM]

It's like how gay marriage was impossible, until it wasn't.

Laughably had a conversation with someone who thought that was a long way off back in ~2013. Medicare is no more than 12 years away from passing.

JUST

Good job children. Now: How much does the government spend on healthcare right now, spending that would be replaced by this spending?

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you say? Replaced with a smaller sum of hundreds of billions of dollars a year thanks to price controls? Which means you get more and pay less?

You are very, very smart kids. Bravo, for being able to do kindergarten level math. And not buying into the corporate media's propaganda points like a dumb shit-eating retard.

[quash]

Medicare is no more than 12 years away from passing.

If you think for a moment that you are ever going to see full-on single payer healthcare in the US, you are out of your goddamned mind.

At most, we will implement a two tiered system like the UK's (I think this is more or less inevitable). There are far too many parties that benefit far too much from the current system to ever see it completely evaporate.

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you say? Replaced with a smaller sum of hundreds of billions of dollars a year thanks to price controls? Which means you get more and pay less?

Not to sound crass, but, citation needed.

[BryanM]

"But it will cost money" is truly the last gasp of desperation of someone who has completely lost the argument.

Let's take the Iraq war. It cost around one trillion dollars a year, when all long term costs are taken into account. Nobody once brought this up, because the argument that the United States should not commit terrorism was a more powerful argument against it.

Of course, dumb people aren't intelligent enough to understand this, and will parrot it like the vacuum of an animal that they are.

We're talking about someone who wants to bring back Don't Ask Don't Tell for trans people in the military, a sham waste of everyone's time that'll cost hundreds of millions of dollars for no fuckin' reason, the farce is naked for anyone of an IQ above 30 to see. (Yes, having first shirts go around and ask men if they like wearing dresses and women with shaved heads if they like to talk in a deep voice is a useful application of our military might.)

"When it's something I want, costs don't matter. When it's something that'll help someone else, costs are the only thing that matters."

I don't think much of people who can't argue a point of view in good, honest faith. To quote our first boy, they aren't even people to me.

I respect the Nazis sieg heiling in the streets far more than such intellectual cowardice. At least they're not lying about who they are.

[BulletMagnet]

Not to sound crass, but, citation needed.

I know I shouldn't even bother because you're plainly not here to actually further any discussion at hand, but seriously, you're such a fucking joke. Somebody else most recently asked about this on page 167 of the topic, and for anyone who still, god help them, somehow thinks you have any interest here beyond trolling folks who actually take this stuff seriously, here's my (mostly) copy-pasted reply, one more fucking time:

------

One quick summary of a couple of "advanced" economies I found looks like this:

Per person health care spending, 2015

United States: $9451
Germany: $5267
Canada: $4608
Australia: $4420
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3983
Italy: $3272
Spain: $3153
South Korea: $2488

If you really want to dig deeper into the data, head here. A few additional things to consider:

- I'd have to do a bit of additional Googling, but at least one economist has stated that if we switched to a universal system and managed to save as much on average as other countries do in comparison to what we spend now, the government's much-maligned annual deficit would completely vanish. Overnight.

- If you hoped that spending double what everyone else does got us health care twice as good as theirs, our outcomes are frequently significantly worse than the rest of the "developed" world (and sometimes the non-developed world too).

- I can guarantee you that the vast, vast majority of U.S. residents have never, ever seen the figures linked here, quite likely never will, and will continue to vote accordingly. And the media which should have made these basic, essential numbers common knowledge years ago will be criticized...as unfairly liberal.

--------

Sanders himself cited a bit of this in an op-ed published literally yesterday; once again, I'm fully aware that you, and anyone like you, don't care in the least about any of this beyond muddying the waters and pissing off the libtards, but frankly anyone who still thinks otherwise at this point needs help beyond what I'm qualified to give.

[evil_ash_xero]

I'm out of steam on these political debates. But I did want to point out that every time I hear "The Dreamers" on the news, I want to fucking vomit.
What a starry eyed name for kids of illegal immigrants. So fucking contrived.

And I'll say what I want, dammit . My dad was a LEGAL immigrant from Spain (as was much of my family). Come here legally...if you're illegal, you gotta go. Come back and learn English. Integrate.
America isn't a fucking charity, and has no "duty" to just let everyone in.

And if you have this opinion, it shouldn't make it OK to be called a "racist". It has nothing to do with race. Just a way to shut down the conversation.

I know both parites and their corporate masters want their cheap labor, and their Democratic votes...but fuck them.

Rant over.

[Mischief Maker]

You know, if we're going to shift from "How are you gonna pay for healthcare" to dreamers in quick succession, it's worth noting a significant overlap here. How are you gonna pay for ending DACA?

DACA was an act of prosecutorial discretion. When a cop pulls you over for speeding and decides to let you off with a warning because there are real criminals out there and going through all the paperwork of punishing you would be a waste of resources, that's an act of prosecutorial discretion. Jeff Sessions was full of shit when he said it was unconstitutional, the supreme court has upheld prosecutorial discretion numerous times.

Essentially among the illegal immigrant population, law-abiding dreamers are a much lower threat than drug smugglers, gang members, and assorted "bad hombres." DACA was an announcement that the administration was going to prioritize its limited resources on deporting illegals who are actually dangerous.

Announcing the end of DACA was just inverse virtue signalling on Jeff Sessions' part (vice signaling?) It might make racists feel all warm and gooey inside, but it's completely counterproductive in terms of public safety. Every agent, every courthouse, every bureaucrat chasing after law-abiding tax-paying dreamers is one less resource pursuing actual dangerous felons, the net result being a more dangerous society.

[evil_ash_xero]

It just seems like we keep making excuses for amnesty. I'm pretty tired of it.
The more we allow, the more will come.

I'm just against illegal aliens. Maybe we could go case by case, and if they have been "good citizens", give them a quick path to becoming a legal citizen.
I dunno...something needs to be done about all this slop. There's ALWAYS a reason to allow illegals to stay. Always.

Obviously, I'm not for a borderless world.

[Rob]

prioritize its limited resources on deporting illegals who are actually dangerous.

So the argument should be about increasing those resources. It's almost like they want illegals to come streaming in.

[quash]

Let's take the Iraq war. It cost around one trillion dollars a year, when all long term costs are taken into account. Nobody once brought this up, because the argument that the United States should not commit terrorism was a more powerful argument against it.

I don't know where you've been since 2003, but the cost of the war has been brought up in the public discourse many times. Hell, our current president campaigned on ending these wars siphoning off our economy. Whether he follows through with that still remains to be seen.

We're talking about someone who wants to bring back Don't Ask Don't Tell for trans people in the military, a sham waste of everyone's time that'll cost hundreds of millions of dollars for no fuckin' reason, the farce is naked for anyone of an IQ above 30 to see. (Yes, having first shirts go around and ask men if they like wearing dresses and women with shaved heads if they like to talk in a deep voice is a useful application of our military might.)

And having a bunch of especially volatile, often times mentally ill, young people at the helm of your nations defense is so much better. Plus, HRT grows on trees.

"When it's something I want, costs don't matter. When it's something that'll help someone else, costs are the only thing that matters."

Thanks for breaking down basic cost:benefit analysis used by every single person on the planet. Are you gonna pay for my college with your own money? No? Alright then.

(Also, you used this very line of reasoning in the same post you decried it).

Democrats decided a long time ago that it should be easier for a man to become a woman than it is for a man to replenish the most essential hormone in his body. All because Joe Biden couldn't even be a benchwarmer in college. Sad!

[quash]

As for this

I don't think much of people who can't argue a point of view in good, honest faith. To quote our first boy, they aren't even people to me.

I respect the Nazis sieg heiling in the streets far more than such intellectual cowardice. At least they're not lying about who they are.

I've lied about nothing. I've disclosed more about myself here than anyone else has. I don't know how much more reassurance you need that I am what I say I am, but I am long past caring about establishing that any further (in large part because of the misdirection tactics employed by a certain someone in this thread who seems to think that I still bother to read every single last one of his posts).

[BulletMagnet]

I don't know how much more reassurance you need that I am what I say I am, but I am long past caring about establishing that any further (in large part because of the misdirection tactics employed by a certain someone in this thread who seems to think that I still bother to read every single last one of his posts).

Again, I know I'm wasting my breath, but even for you this is fucking pitiful. For someone who 1) Has been posting en masse in this topic for as long as you have, and 2) Claims to be as ahead of the curve on the issues as you claim to be, suddenly acting like you've never had so much as an inkling of those incredibly basic health care numbers to the point that we need to start the whole process over again for the millionth time doesn't even pass the laugh test. Dude, just three or four pages ago you were going off on me for talking about it too much for months on end:

I wanted to talk about nothing but Syria for months, and you wanted to talk about anything but. Always going on about Medicare and Social Security or some shit nobody cares about when I wanted to discuss one topic

Sorry, but when you stick your hand up in the air and squeal "citation needed", you're not actually attempting to get at the heart of the issue: you've heard all this stuff numerous times, know full well that there's about as much "meaningful debate" to be had on it as there is on climate science, and would rather we all take another trip on the merry-go-round than actually attempt to have rubber meet road in any capacity. Meanwhile, of course, you get to derail things even further by posting "react to this, libtards!" links to yet another head-up-ass think tank screed about how we ought to stop making rich people pay taxes because they'll keep trying to weasel their way out of it (which is haaaard), and this time if we just let them keep all their money they'll totally use it for hiring and rank-and-file wage hikes, as opposed to executive bonuses and stock buybacks like every other time we've tried this.

In short:

I've lied about nothing. I've disclosed more about myself here than anyone else has.

Citation needed.

[BryanM]

One of his funniest lines was when he said I was a liar and was never in the Air Force. I don't even

Anyway, Donald's flip flop on DACA echoes that line I kept repeating about the 2016 republicn primary: It was a beauty pageant where they tried, and failed, to select the worst person in the world. Next time they really might pick one of those guys who want to finish breaking the 4th amendment like a twig.

___


Yet another benefit her highness Hillary Clinton got: Amazon has scrubbed the avalanche of 1 star reviews off her book. To the point that it claims that 92% of reviewers gave it 5 stars. 92%.

The old man's book did not get this same orwellian perk, for some reason. All the 1 star reviews from Trumpers and Clintonites are included in the aggregate score. Why is that? So very strange. A real Unsolved Mystery.

[Mischief Maker]

Rob, quash, do you know you're being fucked with when Trump flips on DACA, people start burning their MAGA hats, then Trump immediately starts talking about all the "Bad Dudes" on the side of antifa back during the Charlottesville protests like that's still current news?

Although being Trump he's even fucking that up because alienating the Bad Dudes demographic is going to make him extremely vulnerable to ninja attack.

Spoiler

[BulletMagnet]

So you thought the "voter fraud" commission couldn't be any more of a freakishly hypocritical shitshow? O ye of little faith.

After the commission’s most recent meeting, on Tuesday, Kobach confirmed that he plans to continue to use his personal gmail account to conduct commission business. Using his Kansas secretary of state email address, he said, would be a “waste of state resources” as he’s acting as a private citizen on the commission and not in his role as secretary of state.

Fun activity for Team Trump: replace "Kobach" with "Clinton" and compare how eager you are to take him at his word with two seconds ago.

[BryanM]

An extra $1,300,000 in Wall Street bribes for Mr.Obama.

Full disclosure, I wasn't terribly interested in the 2008 primaries after confirming that Obama was a puppet from looking at his Opensecrets page. So I only followed it like a normal human being would - was just mildly happy he won out over Clinton. Thus why I didn't know how abysmally terrible Hillary Clinton was, as a candidate and a human being.

Back then, I seriously thought she would be the next president and was fine with it. Her vice president: Julian Castro. Yeah, they're corrupt, but this is a shit country. That's the best we can do, right?

By the time Tim Kaine was chosen as her running mate - the final decision that conclusively lost the election - I wasn't too surprised. Even if there wasn't a quid-pro-quo deal to have him step down so Debbie could get in there, there is no way she would have chosen (the obvious, correct choice) Julian as her running mate. Her Goldwater conservatism wouldn't allow it - she really doesn't see non-whites as human beings. No way she could have stood living with that guy for 4 to 8 years.

It's easy to rag on the non-materialists, but at least they are getting what they voted for: nothing but unattainable dreams. But aren't their opponents not non-materialists voting for empty pretty words, as well.

Only eight Senators voted against the latest $700 Billion surge into the war machine welfare toilet:

Bob Corker
Kirsten Gillibrand
Patrick Leahy
Jeff Merkley
Ron Wyden
Rand Paul
Mike Lee
Bernard Sanders

Not a single major media outlet concern trolled about "how are we going to pay for this?!?!" or pointed out that this money isn't going to do anything.

[Mischief Maker]

God help us, last week looked so hopeful.

Now the Rs are pushing this Graham-Cassidy healthcare destruction bill with literally 90 seconds of time left allotted for debate. And an amendment preventing states from using their block grant money to set up a single-payer system because "states' rights."

The Koch brothers WILL get their tax cuts, dammit!

[ED-057]

Rand Paul: hey guyz, maybe we shood have teh vote b4 we wage war all willy-nilly...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEJBLf5Skrk
Senate: Fuck you, Rand!