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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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7 hours ago, Degenerate Gardner said:

Pepsi could become the official cola drink of Grift Nation and College Station overnight.

We attended the indoor national championships (T&F) several years ago; I think their concessions already uses Pepsi. I'm not positive because I use the drinking fountain if I'm thirsty.

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8 hours ago, Degenerate Gardner said:

Pepsi could become the official cola drink of Grift Nation and College Station overnight.

As of the late 80s, pretty sure it was a Harper's Index that gave me the number, Pepsi was far more popular with Republicans and Coke was far more popular with Democrats. Hell, Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign plane was paid for by Coca-Cola.

No idea why Tennessee's weird RC Cola fixation didn't make the study, but it's so sugared up, it's basically Pepsi with added diabetes.

And that's kinda the point. Republicans like Pepsi, and sweet tea. Probably pour sugar on their grits, too, when folk ain't lookin'.

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Trump is not good at much, but he's great at grifting.   No conscience with this guy or his ilk.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/3/22365952/trump-dark-patterns-trick-supporters-recurring-donation-winred-gary-coby

Trump used dark patterns to trick supporters into donating millions more than intended

“Asking for forgiveness is easier than permission” was one saying of the man in charge

Quote

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he didn’t stop asking his supporters for money. The emails kept coming in. But by the end of his four years in office, according to a new report in The New York Times, they had begun to look an awful lot like a scam.

By June 2020, the Trump campaign had begun using dark patterns, computer interfaces designed to trick users, to automatically sign up campaign contributors to donate far more money than they had intended — recurring monthly donations, recurring weekly donations, even a one-time surprise “money bomb” per month — by pre-checking the checkboxes for each option, burying the fine print under paragraphs of bold text, and forcing his supporters to wade through it all and opt out if they wanted to make a simple donation.

Here’s how bad it got as of October, according to the NYT:

 

oakImage_1614036252373_jumbo.png

One Kansas City supporter who donated $500 saw his account tapped for $3,000 that month. Another realized their $990 donation had become $8,000. Banks and a major credit card company told the NYT that dealing with fraud claims for WinRed, the conservative fundraising site processing these payments, had started to become a significant percentage of their daily workload. A Trump spokeperson admitted at least $19.7 million worth of its transactions had been disputed. And those are just from people who bothered to dispute the charges.

There’s far more in the full story, like how WinRed pocketed $5 million worth of payment processing fees from those who asked for refunds, but the good news is that maybe, just maybe, people are finally waking up to the dangers that dark patterns pose.

THE FEDS ARE PAYING ATTENTION TO DARK PATTERNS NOW

California just passed a landmark privacy bill banning dark patterns last month. Washington state is attempting one as well. Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Deb Fischer (R-NE) and Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) are planning to reintroduce the DETOUR Act in the next congressional session, according to our sister site Recode — and Recode spoke to acting FTC chair Rebecca Slaughter about her plans to address dark patterns as well.

In the meanwhile, you’ll find dark patterns wherever you look on the web, perhaps nowhere more prominently than the privacy warnings you’ll find on every website you visit these days that warn you about the cookies they collect, in order to comply with EU privacy laws. In far too many cases, there’s no obvious way to opt out of that data collection — instead, there’s a nice bright button that you can press to just give up your data and move on.

UX designer and consultant Harry Brignull coined the phrase “dark patterns” in 2010. Here’s the guest post he wrote for us in 2013. And if you want to laugh and cry at the same time, I highly recommend playing the free, short online game User Inyerface, a master class in horrific UI design.

  Here's the NY Times article this is based on:  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html

It's pretty damning.

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5 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

Trump is not good at much, but he's great at grifting.   No conscience with this guy or his ilk.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/3/22365952/trump-dark-patterns-trick-supporters-recurring-donation-winred-gary-coby

Trump used dark patterns to trick supporters into donating millions more than intended

“Asking for forgiveness is easier than permission” was one saying of the man in charge

  Here's the NY Times article this is based on:  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html

It's pretty damning.

No accusation means shit unless there is accountability. So far, the only institution that has penalized Trump is Twitter. He’s been stealing, grifting, lying, raping, cheating his entire life. And it ain’t going to stop unless all his money is taken away or his freedom. Neither will happen. The government doesn’t have the balls or the will. So I’m glad he’s stealing money from his idiot followers. 

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6 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

We attended the indoor national championships (T&F) several years ago; I think their concessions already uses Pepsi. I'm not positive because I use the drinking fountain if I'm thirsty.

You're not wrong. Soda (regardless of manufacturer) is one of the worst things to consume. And the healthiest thing to drink by far is indeed water.

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No mention of where she got her undergrad from, which I suspect is what the weird GPA reference is to (Do JDs even ever mention that for their time in law school?), but lots of verbiage is devoted to her experience as a travel blogger in her bio along with experience in lower level "assistant to" federal jobs during the lesser Bush administration.

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I wasn't aware that it was impossible to be racist if you aren't white.  

Actually, I was aware that the word impossible in that sentence is not a thing.  Guess I'm not dumb enough to be in her target audience so I'll move on.

Also, for whoever was surprised about the homo roundup proposed over on Texags.  I don't know if they are still around, but the whole reason I originally came out back in the Hornfans days was because some morons were busy banging that drum.  Just like the racists, they didn't go away, but they did get marginalized.  I fully expect that if the fascists end up winning, it won't be long before they are looking to round us up.  

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17 minutes ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

I wasn't aware that it was impossible to be racist if you aren't white.  

 

Unfortunately, I have seen a fair number of militant blacks and academics make this exact assertion.

The theory behind it is that they lack power, so they can't truly be racist.  Which is pretty mind-bottling unto itself.

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On 4/3/2021 at 9:42 PM, RDCanecutter said:

Whenever I see Georgia politicians taking themselves this seriously, I am reminded of the worst parody of a Texan written by someone who watched a couple of episodes of "Dallas," then ate a cheese sandwich. The puffing-up, the conviction that they are the center of the world. 

And then that parody of a Texan moves here from Nevada after getting beat by a Democrat, tries on a fake accent, starts wearing a cowboy hat, tries to include "Big" in front of his name, and runs for Texas's 6th Congressional District.

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So have we tracked down the person(s) responsible for the absolutely idiotic idea that tracking devices are embedded in the vaccine?  I found out today that my up to this point level headed sister, who was no fan of Republicans as recently as 6 months ago, has decided not to vaccinate because of the tracking devices being embedded in them.  I feel like someone needs their ass beat, I just need to know whose ass I need to go after.

I also feel like a failure because the one ally in my family has bought into at least some of this buillshit because of facebook propoganda.  I'm trying really hard not to be completely demoralized, but I have to figure out how I'm going to get her to see reason when I talk to her about this.  

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31 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Unfortunately, I have seen a fair number of militant blacks and academics make this exact assertion.

The theory behind it is that they lack power, so they can't truly be racist.  Which is pretty mind-bottling unto itself.

The argument is there’s a difference in being racist and being prejudice. Being racist has to do with those who are the majority in Power.  Then it goes to those who understand the difference between power and Power.

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38 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Unfortunately, I have seen a fair number of militant blacks and academics make this exact assertion.

The theory behind it is that they lack power, so they can't truly be racist.  Which is pretty mind-bottling unto itself.

Sounds like they are thinking of discrimination due to racism.  

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Just now, Pato del Muerto said:

Sounds like they are thinking of discrimination due to racism.  

Well, it attempts to make a distinction between racism that has some kind of de jure or de facto result and that that is just an individual attitude (Pancho's "prejudice").

But the current definition or usage of the term racism has expanded beyond that.

But I think we have to do our best to eradicate the individual attitude, which will never entirely disappear; but it's really no answer to say racism is only a problem if it exists in a person with the power to inflict it on someone.  Because the racist is eventually going to wield power over someone, even if it isn't "majority political" power.

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If you would use government force to discriminate against a group were you in power, you are a fucking racist. I don't care whether you happen to be in power at the moment or not.  Saying "I'd rather date someone the same race as me" is prejudiced. Saying that the government should restrict the rights of others who are not the same race as me is racist, whether or not the government actually is restricting their rights.

You don't have to be in power to be racist.

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9 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Unfortunately, I have seen a fair number of militant blacks and academics make this exact assertion.

The theory behind it is that they lack power, so they can't truly be racist.  Which is pretty mind-bottling unto itself.

I understand that theory pretty well, in context. It's bullshit, but it is an interesting argument that points to a fairly fundamental fact: solving the meta problem of people generally not being reasonable and accepting of each other is not necessarily an important priority when dealing with one particular group being pathologically intolerant of another. At the extreme end, does it matter that some Jews in concentration camps hated ethnic Germans? I mean, yeah, that was wrong, but clearly not as wrong.

Doesn't justify a black man being a dickwad, but in the context of a whole society going Trumpy, black racism isn't really all that big a deal.

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11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

And then that parody of a Texan moves here from Nevada after getting beat by a Democrat, tries on a fake accent, starts wearing a cowboy hat, tries to include "Big" in front of his name, and runs for Texas's 6th Congressional District.

YOU FORGOT YELLING. REAL COWBOYS YELL.

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25 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

YOU FORGOT YELLING. REAL COWBOYS YELL.

Reminds me of one of Alabama's finest, Dale Peterson.  He was a cowboy that yelled, a man ahead of his time, not to mention a criminal.

 

Edited by Bojack
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13 minutes ago, Bojack said:

Reminds me of one of Alabama's finest, Dale Peterson.  He was a cowboy that yelled, a man ahead of his time, not to mention a criminal.

 

A petty shoplifter if I recall. I don't think his "ranch" is very far from Birmingham. The camera operator probably had to be careful so as not to get a housing development or strip mall on the screen.

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11 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

The theory behind it is that they lack power, so they can't truly be racist.  Which is pretty mind-bottling unto itself.

Well, they’re sort of right. It isn’t at all the same. If a black person doesn’t trust any white person and thinks we’re all out to screw them, can you blame them? They probably have no shortage of life experiences that support that attitude even though it’s not really fair. But there’s no black supremacy movement which holds that blacks should control the government, the corporations, the banks, the schools, the courts, the police, and all the levers of power while keeping the inferior white man down and preventing him from voting.

There’s a reason the word “honky” doesn’t offend white people. It’s because we enjoy a position of power. But if we lived in a majority black society and watched our white fathers routinely disrespected, put down, and beat up by the black majority, calling them honky and comparing them to animals, with the blessing of and participation by the black sheriff, with the support of the black judges, we’d probably find it a lot more offensive. If there were separate bathrooms and drinking fountains for us, if we couldn’t get a hotel room, if businesses that were hiring put up signs that said, “No honky need apply,” we would certainly feel a lot different about it.

White people need to tread real lightly when discussing racism in the African-American community because if you try to compare black racism to white racism then you’re probably just going to come across sounding like a white racist. 

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5 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

PS: That was a year of gold-standard Alabama political commercials. Here's Tim James demonstrating that almost anybody can learn English. Hell, Tim didn't grow up hearing it, and he's almost got it down.

 

the piano riff in the background is on point for conveying this message.

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8 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

PS: That was a year of gold-standard Alabama political commercials. Here's Tim James demonstrating that almost anybody can learn English. Hell, Tim didn't grow up hearing it, and he's almost got it down.

 

There were some great spoofs of those ads.

 

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PS: That was a year of gold-standard Alabama political commercials. Here's Tim James demonstrating that almost anybody can learn English. Hell, Tim didn't grow up hearing it, and he's almost got it down.
 

Oh god. I know all those James morons.

They are dumb as turnip greens.
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