Happy New Year You Surly Bastards!
Everything posted by ndawg
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Sam Ehlinger
Nearby teammate yelled "duck!"
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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult
Cults have three kinds of people -- psychopaths, true believers, and cowards. They work because two out of those three groups of people (the psychos and the believers) always end up in charge, and they are perfectly willing to inflict punishment on anyone who expresses doubt (the cowards). Fear always keeps the rank in file in line. This doesn't surprise me at all. When the GOP is done for good, I would also not be surprised to find out that their staff and leadership operated exactly like a cult, and that most of the rank and file were either psychos trying to climb the ladder, batshit insane true believers, or absolutely terrified cowards who got conditioned to believe they couldn't get out.
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Donald Trump 2018
He must have made at least eight (if not nine) figures from The Apprentice, right? It's hard to imagine all that vanishing into thin air. Then again, I'm not a vain narcissist that buys gold plated toilets...
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Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy
The nature of professional comedy is changing. The change agent is outrage. Now, people have always gotten off on outrage, but these days, on social media, they can join massive internet mobs. Mobs are bad. Sure, these guys are millionaires, but they also care deeply about comedy. It's their life's passion. I don't think it's envy of youth; in fact, I think the opposite is in play. Young people are more likely to let a younger comedian who looks and talks like them get away with "edgy" humor. Age bias is a thing. Louis CK obviously did some fucked up shit in his personal life. When it came to light, it harmed his reputation. Every celebrity that opens up and masturbates in front of non consenting adults is rolling the dice, and in my book, he's deserved the harm his reputation has taken. I'm just pointing out that misplaced outrage is a growing problem for comedy (and our society in particular). Now, let's get back to making fun of the alt-right.
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Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy
I'm pretty damned liberal. I don't think you realize how few of us are part of those frothing-at-the-mouth internet mobs. Possibly because you never bothered looking. But when we show up places to protest, say, Trump, the right of course lumps us in with these radical left social media mobs in order to minimize our message.
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Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy
I think it's more that older comedians are lamenting the loss of their medium, which was once (ironically) a safe space to be irreverent and slay sacred cows. Now every word they say is judged (often out of context) and prone to be put on blast on social media, igniting a mob of people more addicted to outrage than passionate about social justice.
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Prioritizing the Congressional Investigations into Trump
The plan shouldn't be to go after the die hard fanatics first. Rather, congress should aim to wear away at those adjacent to the die hards -- these are the people who have been susceptible to buying in to the "both sides" nonsense that the fanatics spout, but have never really got behind Trump themselves. The first thing the House needs to do is stop letting Trump control the news cycle. That means they need to go on the attack, and they need to anticipate Trump's counterpunches, always bringing the focus back to Trump's criminal behaviour.
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Why we are where we are...
Okay, cool. I agree. Wait, what? Are you that naive? LOL. I'll let you in on a little secret, since I'm feeling nice today. Trump's support of the second amendment is far less a priority for his base than the GOP reps/senators supporting Trump unconditionally.
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Donald Trump 2018
I agree with the last sentence, but not for the same reasons. Caving to Trump's base is not some magic jiu-jitsu manoeuvre that will trigger a reshuffling of allegiances. The best way to beat Trump is to hammer home his flaws over and over.
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Why we are where we are...
No, we're really not.
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Why we are where we are...
There have always been lots of ignorant and uninformed people that get suckered into all kinds of bullshit, and it's ludicrous to hold them to any standard of civic duty because it's beyond their means. I'll note that these Trumpkins actually believe that they are, in fact, informed and engaged. What's different about today's America -- and why we're up shit's creek -- is that those ignorant and uninformed people all got suckered into the same bullshit coming from the same conman. Trump's their guy, who proudly broadcasts their group identity to the whole world. We're always going to have ignorant and uninformed people. If the great experiment survives this, we can never let them become a unified voting block again.
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How MSNBC Works
The mistake was disseminated to right wing trolls in order to cite it out of context as evidence of equal dishonesty among liberal journalists. Duh!
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So...about Charlie Strong at USF...
I would say he was neither overrated nor underrated. Sure, a shitty poker player can still get a royal flush from time to time, but it's all relative. Strong may have been below our standard, but he's better than "shitty" for a program like USF. It took years of consistently causing favorable outcomes at Louisville for him to end up winning a BCS bowl. And he and his staff put a lot of 3* and 4* players into the NFL. More than anything, I'm just saying that there's no point in using hyperbole to recast his tenure here in an exaggerated light.
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So...about Charlie Strong at USF...
This is veering into the absurd. The idea I think you're suggesting is that if we really studied Strong's resume before Texas, we'd see he was overrated. That's bullshit. He had a relatively short career as HC before coming to Texas, and during that time he enjoyed some success. As it turns out, Charlie Strong punched above his weight class at Louisville. Back then, his star was bright, and he was perceived by many to be ready for a big time program. Plenty of college coaches better than Strong would not have done as well as Strong did at Louisville, under the same conditions. There's just a huge amount of variability inherent to a head coach's tenure. He recruited and developed well, and built a great team. He's obviously not good enough to reliably reproduce those results, which is why he got fired. But we don't need to pretend that he didn't accomplish all that much.
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Policy or Party?
This is a really terrible thread.
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Bogeyman vs Reality
Won't somebody please post some concrete evidence of why they believe the earth is round? You know, specific.
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Donald Trump 2018
"Decimated" ISIS... lulz
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Tucker Carlson Tonight
What caused you to leap to such a conclusion?
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The Robert Mueller Investigation
There's benefit for the SC here, too, though. Mueller's recommendation of going easy on Flynn forces Trump to adjust his narrative. With Manafort, his spin was that the conflicted Mueller and his band of angry Democrats were coercing Manafort and others into making false confessions to ultimately build a case against Trump. Now Mueller appears to have been going easy on Flynn, and in addition, the judge got to tell a story that Mueller could not: namely, how disgusted he was when we was confronted with the truth of Flynn's actions. This might cast dispersion into Trump's "the deep state (special council) is out to get me" story.
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The Robert Mueller Investigation
I don't either, but I can speculate: if Trump agrees to resign voluntarily, the likelihood of civil unrest drops significantly.
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Donald Trump 2018
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Russia saw a fire and started pouring gasoline on it.
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Donald Trump 2018
It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to believe he's that stupid than the alternative -- that he's a good enough actor to surgically drop these precise admissions of guilt within a larger volume of unscripted, meandering quasi-legal commentary.
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Donald Trump 2018
I'm not sure anyone believes that Russia has compromised as much of our government as you suggest. They seem to have influenced the NRA, and they've certainly influenced and colluded with the Trump campaign/administration. They may even have a congressman or two in their pocket, but there are nevertheless too many other motivations for Republicans being complicit to assume Russia's got the majority of the GOP in their pocket. It's plausible, I guess, but never forget how utterly stupid many of these politicians are. If their base chants "lock her up" and wears red hats, they're going to back Trump. At any rate, the last paragraph seems beyond the pale. Russia wasn't (and isn't) "powerful" in the traditional sense, they've just waged a successful psyops campaign against our more uninformed portions of the public. You shouldn't conclude that means they're somehow a great power.
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Donald Trump 2018
My guess would be to continue their efforts at radicalizing Americans.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Nope, you seem psychotic, though. There's a degree of corruption and dysfunction in our government that posing a legitimate existential threat to our stability and prosperity. Every single comment you post here seems designed to distract others from that threat. Are you so sure that you're not in the blast radius of the damage that the GOP and Trump are heaping on this country?