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GOP Primary: Mass Hysteria
Posts
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432682/ted-cruz-national-review-endorses-texas-senator-president
I don't disagree with you on considering the relative scales of harm brought about by US foreign policy, but this statement isn't entirely true. We probably don't have US personnel engaging in water boarding any more, but many, many techniques that most would qualify as torture are ongoing. This is without getting into the murkier area of transferring detainees to countries with even less restrictive policies on interrogation, a practice that is much harder to properly monitor.
Edit: To avoid tangent-ing too hard, I believe US foreign policy is going to be inevitably immoral for the foreseeable future. That said, a Trump-defined foreign policy will almost undoubtedly see the blatant abuses of the Bush administration fade into history as a minor dalliance with the devil versus the full-on tango we'd likely be living in.
And this is why Trump scares me less than Cruz.
Because he's less likely than Cruz to tattoo numbers and a pink triangle on my arm.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I 100% blame the internet. It allows anyone and anything to look like legitimate sources, and fact is no longer a thing. Like I can find a large section of the internet that agrees with any stance I'd like to take and then via bias ignore all other sources that disagree with the stance I've taken.
Like I've had reasonably intelligent people try to tell me that the entire medical profession, all properly trained doctors, are working from a set of lies. That medical doctors are completely incompetent of what they are talking about, and that homeopathic doctors are the ones that know what they are doing. They had all kinds of Internet articles and sources to throw at me, that look and sound very legitimate. Heck I could even get taken in by some of what they were peddling. The internet allows the legitimizing of any stance no matter how thin it's reasoning out factual basis, and can allow folks to "do their own research" through a stack of pure bullshit that agrees with their already existing biases.
For instance the Trump appeal comes from the pure bullshit that the right wing media machines have been churning out for over a decade. If you look at what he is peddling a lot of it is based on the hyperbole and lies and faulty reasoning and economic principles coming from the right wing media machine for years (like insisting that welfare spending is the problem when welfare spending is like one of the smallest sectors of government spending there is). Even better the right wing media machine hasn't been engaging their opposition in any meaningful or reasoned manner for decades. The information their opponents are giving out isn't wrong because the info is wrong and here's the refutation of that info the info is wrong because the opposition is the one delivering it.
Also this.
Maybe marginally
We are arguing over whether we would rather listen to nothing but Call Me Maybe for 4 years or get an eye gouged out with a red-hot poker
"Will I receive immediate medical attention?"
"Yes, an ambulance is standing by with an excellent EMT."
"...Do I get a cool eyepatch?"
"No."
".............Fuck, give me the poker."
Gonna go in a wild and say that pulling the knives on Carson like a jilted lover isn't going to do any favors to Cruz or the GOPe.
And his inevitable book tour.
Yeah he'd just tattoo numbers and a crescent moon on Muslim's arms (like he's already suggested as much at some point, that we need some way of identifying Muslims).
Not saying Cruz isn't worse, Cruz still wins my most terrifying award. Because a central portion of his religious stance is that we are already in the end times.
I'm also not trying to say a personal fear of someone that will directly affect you is wrong either.
I'm saying let's not just put the serial numbers on just one of these two truly shitty candidates.
Yeah that's a cute metaphor except in this metaphor, that eye you are poking out is ME.
Again, that's the guy who just introduced Ted Cruz, the man who wants to be the President, saying he refuses to be ashamed of wanting ME dead if I don't repent.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
As fun as it is to laugh at The National Review, it has nothing on David Brooks' meltdown over Trump. I think the man is genuinely having a breakdown. His columns have become screeds, he's stopped doing the cutesy politico analysis with Gail Collins, and he actually looked a bit disheveled and off-balance the last time I saw him on TV.
Which is all awesome. I have always hated that smug fucker's "conservative a liberal could love" shtick. It's nice to know that Trump is pretty much destroying his credibility on the right and left.
And the other one would probably not care a lot but do really shitty things to you because the people who are voting for him are loudly telling him to
So
What's the difference, in the end?
TLDL version:
All of a sudden, he finds Trump appeals to him over a broad range of ideas, and gay rights isn't really that important.
The difference is in one of these scenarios, I am far more likely to be dead.
I am unsure what exactly is difficult to grasp here.
Also, for related reasons, I am leaving the thread for a while, before I get myself in trouble.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I'm not trying to be callous, or say either one of them would be good for you?
I'm just saying that there's no reason to trust that Trump would be any better for you than Cruz would.
Sorry if I offended you.
Thinking differently is commendable, and necessary. That isn't what's happening here. When you look at the bastard offspring of an Oompa Loompa and Voldemort and think, "I want to give that man control of nuclear weapons," you're just an idiot.
If someone thought that the best way to clean plates was to set them on fire in the sink, that person would be a moron. Not all opinions are created equal. American political discourse would be stronger if we didn't have this weird reflex to put the opinions of Neil de Grasse Tyson and Cousin Cleetus on the same level.
Carly Rae Jepsen, unlike Ted Cruz, is both an American and Canadian National treasure. And her new album Emotion is an amazing pop album, probably the best I heard in 2015.
Technical training is not a substitute for a broad general education. The United States has blindly wandered into the 20th century debate between Western democracy and fascism and socialism regarding education, and not on the good side.
The mid-20th century Western democracies believed in providing citizens with a broad education in the arts, sciences and civics because that made for better citizens. The totalitarian regimes believed in narrow technical education, leaving government education to the political party and cultural education to the home (and church in the religious autocratic states).
There's a lot of people (like Shaun King) saying that NOW Carson is dead to them. Where the hell they were in these long months?
Carly Rae Jepsen '16
Are you secretly Griffin McElroy?
I don't remember the source where I read it, but I remember reading the climate change deniers were just as likely to be well educated in science than not. The theory for this was that people who are well educated in a STEM field are very capable of doing their own research and if they start from a bias towards denial they are more than capable of finding relatively not-crazy-sounding sources to convince themselves that the science backs them up.
Her new album is actually good. I feel like Cassandra here. I speak the truth and you refuse to listen.
Happens with a lot of fields. Nothing quite as insufferable as the "I'm using Logic and Reason and Science and therefore opposing me is wrong" types.
But he's not unknown. That's my point. He's thin-skinned, reactionary, holds a grudge and is, from rhetoric, willing to use violence against people he dislikes to get his way and believes in using strength to force allies to do what he wants.
He's the kind of guy who would start a war over a perceived insult.
Uh, alot. Obama is nowhere near as bad as GWB and Trump is far worse then GWB in that at least GWB wasn't stupid or strongman or thin-skinned enough to, say, start a war with Russia. Trump is totally that kind of person.
Yes, but in this case it's ok because I'M RIGHT.
But yea, research has shown that the more educated you are on a particular topic, the harder it is to correct any deeply help opinions you might have on that topic resulting from misinformation or confirmation biases. Your brain has a lot more ammunition to use in the defense of its beliefs than does someone who is relatively ignorant of the subject.
What a stunning insight. If we've got everything so figured out in here, then it's possible we don't need a GOP Primary thread at all!
The reason we have to seriously consider the opinion of Cousin Cleetus is that a significant portion of the population is agreeing with him and wants him as their president. Simple stupidity is insufficient to explain the number and passion of Trump's supporters.
Don't get me wrong. I think some of Trump's supporters are stupid. But stupid people still have actual reasons for why they do what they do, and I wand to understand those reasons.
I will note for the court that the defendant does not deny the allegations
3DS: 2981-5304-3227
I don't think they're stupid. They know exactly what Trump wants, and what that would result in. The thing is they think those are good things. They're not operating on the same moral framework that we are.
Let me bring up an example. A lot of neo-Nazi will claim, with a straight face, that Adolf Hitler was kind and caring to all peoples of the world. They can claim this because they don't consider his victims to be people. Same thing here. When they claim Trump isn't racist, they claim that because they don't see Hispanics, black people, or Arabs as people. It's like claiming someone is racist against mosquitos, to them. They don't see Trump's platform as genocide, they see it as fumigation.
The reason people are chalking it up to stupidity is because we're more familiar with faulty reasoning, rather than alien moral foundations.
Steam: pazython
A president's ability to start rounding up and executing the gays or the muslims is far more unlikely then their ability to start a shooting war with Iran.
With a gop lead congress I wouldn't be so sure about domestic fuckery. Witness the patriot act.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The difference between Trump and Cruz as president would be Cruz is more likely to get groups like the Freedom Caucus to start introducing domestic fuckery. Trump would still probably sign it anyway. So the result would be pretty much the same since in both cases Cruz is still being a shit disturber.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
shaun king seems like a weird one to mention
he was already pretty critical of Carson
The Patriot Act took a major terrorist attack on US soil to pass and is still not even close to the kind of shit people are talking about above or the kind of shit the President can get up to in foreign affairs without needing Congress. There's simply no comparison here in terms of severity.
And he's also talked about how America's vassals should be paying tribute and is willing to keep a grudge going for 30 years over someone telling him he has small hands.
Trump is exactly the kind of person who would react aggressively to slights against him and that's scary as fuck on the international level from the leader of the US.
That explains everything!
Do not engage the Watermelons.