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A story about a pathetic man's downfall


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1 hour ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

He's a God, a prophet, the "one" who will save us all from whatever paranoid thing you want or need him to save us from. It has been a cult up to this point but now he might as well be Osama Bin Laden leading a terrorist organization. Someone to champion the causes of our worst at the sake of his ego and perceived character. 

Osama bin Laden wasn’t a liar. He was consistent in the application of his philosophy and never denied what he was doing. He never pretended to be a defender of American democracy while he sought to destroy it. And he hated the Saudi Royals. 
 

I don’t think comparing him to Donald Trump is exactly fair, especially when we’re losing a 9/11’s worth of American lives to COVID-19 every day and we STILL have no national strategy to combat it. Trump has done more damage to America than bin Laden ever did. Although a good argument could be made that Trump is part of the damage bin Laden did to America and that’s totally reasonable. 

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Some like it hot, and some sweat, when the heat is on.


Most boring concert I ever saw. He literally just performed his repetitive music videos the whole show.

However, Belinda Carlisle opened....and goddamn, she was smoke.



Yeah I fully admit I never thought something like that would happen. I was wrong.


I said it before, I’ll repeat it: I never wanted to be wrong about anything as much as I wanted to be wrong about all this. Really and truly.
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To Trump:
Losing the Presidency is bad.
Losing Twitter is an incredible insult.
But losing the opportunity to host the PGA Championship on a course you own; one of golf's 4 majors....that might be the ultimate disgrace to Trump.  This needs to happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/01/09/golf-trump-pga-america/
On the day after the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a reckless mob of President Trumpsupporters — a throng spurred on by the president himself — it might make sense that Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player could have woken up, checked out the headlines, and said to themselves, “You know, I ought to decline that Presidential Medal of Freedom after all.” Accepting an honor from this president at this time isn’t showing respect to the office. It’s willingly associating with a delusional leader who has done his best to dismantle our democracy. 
But the problem doesn’t lie just with Sorenstam and Player, two of golf’s all-time greats, who followed through with long-held plans to receive their honors from Trump in a private ceremony Thursday. The problem is with golf as a whole, because the sport has entangled itself with this embattled president and apparently doesn’t see a way to make a clean break
 
That’s true at least for the PGA of America, which is scheduled to hold its signature PGA Championship at Trump’s facility in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022. That the tournament, one of four majors annually on golf’s calendar, should be moved is obvious, and it’s shameful that the PGA stood by after Wednesday’s horror show at the Capitol and announced nothing about its intentions. Messages to PGA of America spokespeople went unanswered this week. The organization’s most recent tweet is from Wednesday: a congratulations to outgoing LPGA commissioner Mike Whan.
Move along? Nothing to see here?
More than any sport I have covered — and that’s a lot of them — golf is detached from reality. In some ways, therein lies its charm. Play a late-afternoon round with a group of friends, with the shadows long and the light low, and the golf course is a perfect place to escape from the stresses of everyday life.
 
But such detachment creates an almost complete lack of self-awareness — from the people who play it to the people who govern it to the people who promote it. Think that’s not true? Sit in for a spirited debate about whether the grooves in the face of a club should be squared or V-shaped, or whether a putter should be anchored against the body or not, and you’ll know that the matters of import in golf don’t relate to the problems of the world. It’s elitist by nature and history. I love it, but damn if it isn’t self-absorbed and flawed.
 
Spoiler

Here, though, golf — writ large — has to understand the moment and the man in question. In choosing to go to the White House Thursday, Player and Sorenstam — natives of South Africa and Sweden, respectively — missed their chance to say, “Enough is enough.” The PGA of America can’t let a similar opportunity slide. It’s about the 2022 PGA Championship. But it’s also about the sport’s relationship with its most visible amateur player going forward.
Of all the traits golf purports to teach, honor is foremost among them. Golfers honor the rules, whether anyone is watching them or not. They honor their competitors by honestly recording their scores. In a casual amateur match, there is no referee. There is only trust that two players are reporting what happened truthfully.
Trump has torched those traits from the highest position in the nation, not just as a weekend hacker. This is worth noting because his tentacles are deep in the sport. His Virginia course hosted the Senior PGA Championship in 2017. His New Jersey course hosted the U.S. Women’s Open that same summer. At a media day to promote that event, Mike Davis, then the president of the U.S. Golf Association, outlined his sport’s stance on Trump — whose transgressions to that point included, among other things, boasting about sexually assaulting women. (He was elected after those remarks.)
“Let me make it very clear that we came here, this was all about coming to a great golf course to play the greatest championship in women’s golf,” Davis said then. “You know, the USGA since its founding in 1894 has never been involved with politics. Our focus is solely on the game of golf, and we appreciate there’s some out there that want to make this a political event, but we’re not.”
Debate whether that was an appropriate response at the time. There’s no doubt it’s an inappropriate approach following Wednesday.
That goes for playing partners, too. No leading figure in a sport has more separation between himself and whoever’s in second than Tiger Woods in golf. Before and over the course of this presidency, Woods has played golf with Trump, dined with Trump, palled around with Trump.
“He’s the president of the United States,” Woods said in 2018. “You have to respect the office. No matter who is in the office — you may like, dislike the personality or the politics — but we all must respect the office.”
On Jan. 20, he’ll be out of office. Will Woods — or any athlete — be willing to decline the invitation of an ex-president? Teeing it up to respect the office is one thing. Teeing it up with a person who used that office to incite violence against the country whose values he was supposed to uphold is another.
Right now, the 2022 PGA Championship is the only prominent tournament slated to be held at a Trump facility. The PGA Tour moved on from a long tradition at Doral, the course Trump owns outside Miami, but that move had more to do with the tour wanting an event in Mexico than abandoning Trump. The R&A, which oversees the game in the U.K., has not scheduled its flagship British Open for Trump’s resort in Turnberry, Scotland, which last held the event in 2009 — before Trump bought the property.
But it seems likely that Trump will pursue events for his properties once he leaves office. In 2013, before he ran for president, Trump’s club in Loudoun County, Va., hosted the PGA Junior Championship. The facility overlooks the Potomac River, a beautiful spot. In the week leading up to that event, I visited the club and asked Trump about his ambitions for his courses.
“I think I’ll get many, many tournaments, because I have the best product,” he told me that day. “Nobody has land like this.”
In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol this week, many of Trump’s surrogates finally abandoned the president — by resigning or denouncing his actions or both. The PGA of America said nothing. That’s telling and troubling. 
President Trump may love the sport of golf. By now, the sport can ill afford to love him back.

 


I’d say it’s highly unlikely the PGA will stick with that venue.

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8 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

Boo hoo. Conservatives wanted private companies to run everything. That's what's happening. Personally, I'd love for Twitter to be heavily regulated and controlled.  But the "freedom" people don't want that and they got what they wanted. Twitter, a private company, is doing what it wants to do. 

Actual conservatives know how much of this works.  Those people don't have a party right now and are better aligned with Democrats.  Whatever is left on teamtrump is a shell of the conservative movement.  I'll vote D for the forseeable future...hell I had left early in GWB first term as it became apparent nobody really gave a shit about fiscal responsibility and I was a dumb college student dabbling in hypotheticals vs what was actually going on in the real world.  It's nice to see much of what the R's really stand for come out in the open now.  At least we have to thank trump for that - I'm being serious saying that.  It's much better out in the open.  

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10 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

 


Most boring concert I ever saw. He literally just performed his repetitive music videos the whole show.

However, Belinda Carlisle opened....and goddamn, she was smoke.



I said it before, I’ll repeat it: I never wanted to be wrong about anything as much as I wanted to be wrong about all this. Really and truly.

 

Damn, I forgot that I was at that show. 

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53 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Right wing posters? They're all in DT downplaying this. How about all the posters here, myself included, who told Brisket and his ledge dwellers they were nuts. I never thought we would see these fuckfaces actually taking up arms and storming the government to prevent the transition of power. At least they shot their wad and no one is going to take them lightly again. 

The sentiment expressed in your final sentence is what concerns me. We ARE taking them lightly unless this cancer is aggressively rooted out at all levels. It won’t be. Mere awareness is long overdue but far from enough.

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3 minutes ago, mdmost said:

I think you'll see the Biden administration do what the Trump one didn't and take domestic terrorism a lot more seriously. 

We can start by calling them actual fucking terrorists.  This kid gloves shit needs to stop - and I think it will.  We are entering the 'finding out' phase.  I'm like Bart Scott right now. 

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26 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Osama bin Laden wasn’t a liar. He was consistent in the application of his philosophy and never denied what he was doing. He never pretended to be a defender of American democracy while he sought to destroy it. And he hated the Saudi Royals. 
 

I don’t think comparing him to Donald Trump is exactly fair, especially when we’re losing a 9/11’s worth of American lives to COVID-19 every day and we STILL have no national strategy to combat it. Trump has done more damage to America than bin Laden ever did. Although a good argument could be made that Trump is part of the damage bin Laden did to America and that’s totally reasonable. 

I mean, in some ways, he very much was a liar. He twisted and sold the best and worst parts of their religion and identity to support violence. Trump has used the same with Christianity and some bastardized version of what it is to be an American. These playbooks have been used for years to push seemingly harmless groups into cultish/dangerous hordes. 

*kill Americans and live eternity with your share of virgins. Virgins take over the government and you will live eternity as a true patriot. 

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3 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

I mean, in some ways, he very much was a liar. He twisted and sold the best and worst parts of their religion and identity to support violence. Trump has used the same with Christianity and some bastardized version of what it is to be an American. These playbooks have been used for years to push seemingly harmless groups into cultish/dangerous hordes. 

But that twisted interpretation of Islam didn’t originate with bin Laden. That came before him and was endorsed and promoted by the Saudi royals to justify their claim to power. Bin Laden was a true believer and rebelled against the Saudi royal family, giving up an easy life of wealth and power in the family business that was closely tied to the Saudi royals, because he saw them as apostates  

I don’t agree with his philosophy. I don’t agree with any theocrat’s philosophy. Religion poisons everything. But bin Laden was clear about what he believed, he genuinely believed it, and never pretended otherwise. At least he had a code. If he told me he’d gladly repay me on Tuesday for a burger today, I’d trust him more than I’d trust Trump. No way would Trump pay me back. 

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Just so y’all know what we’re dealing with....here are some of the replies from Jerry Patterson (yeah, a real limpwristed libtard) FB page when he dared criticize the assault on the Capitol:

WHEN THE CHINESE LAND TROOPS ON OUR SOIL Y'ALL WILL BE SINGING A DIFFERENT TUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[name redacted] NEWS FLASH
Chinese soldiers are massing at Canadian and mexico borders. WTH?

Jerry Patterson This is a set up. Trump is with the military in Abilene. If you don’t already know what’s happening, you will within the next seven days.

Jerry Patterson not Trump supporters! They were warned about ANTIFA plans and no extra security, something sounds off

Quit saying that! It was not a maga mob!!!,Antifa was infiltrated with tbe marchers!!!

Wasn't MAGA. It was Antifa dressed as MAGA

—————-

So....as I’ve said before, this country is simply too stupid to survive as a going concern. We ingested the fatal poison long ago. Now....we’re just watching the inevitable, as our organs shut down one by one.

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46 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

I mean, in some ways, he very much was a liar. He twisted and sold the best and worst parts of their religion and identity to support violence. Trump has used the same with Christianity and some bastardized version of what it is to be an American. These playbooks have been used for years to push seemingly harmless groups into cultish/dangerous hordes. 

*kill Americans and live eternity with your share of virgins. Virgins take over the government and you will live eternity as a true patriot. 

I think bin Laden believed what he was selling to others. It was certainly twisted, but he believed it.  Bin Laden was a super rich guy who willingly sacrificed quite a bit for his beliefs, twisted as they were. Trump doesn't really have any beliefs. He won't sacrifice for anything. He knowingly lies to people and uses them for personal gain. Trump isn't Christian. At all really. He may actually believe the election was fraudulent, but I have my doubts about that too. The only closely held belief he has is the belief that he is the best person to ever exist. That belief allows him to lie with ease to his followers because he doesn't consider them good enough for the truth. They are just stepping stones which allow him to go where he wants to go. 

Edited by FondrenRoad
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2 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

 


That lady did not die because she was brave. She died because she was foolish. I don’t believe she ever thought they would use lethal force.

 

It's the aggy bonfire paradox.  aggy nation said they sacrificed themselves for tradition when in reality they were too stupid to recognize they were participating in an OSHA nightmare that had been deemed potentially deadly.

The rioters not associating to possibility of death with storming the capitol is on them.

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2 hours ago, mdmost said:

Right wing posters? They're all in DT downplaying this. How about all the posters here, myself included, who told Brisket and his ledge dwellers they were nuts. I never thought we would see these fuckfaces actually taking up arms and storming the government to prevent the transition of power. At least they shot their wad and no one is going to take them lightly again. 

I was closer to the Brisket side of the scale but tried to stay optimistic about restraint.  Growing up with a Narcissistic father I knew it was a distinct possibility but hoped adults would restrain him.  What sealed this outcome was the recent firing of anyone that was reasonable and leaving him with Meadows, Giuliani and Don Jr as his closest advisors.  All bets off in that scenario.

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We know a woman whose is bigly into Plexus.  (Who doesn’t?)

Anyway, she has some Plexus related business that starts with the letter Q.  It’s been blocked for a month.

There seems to be a bot purge going on which would explain all of the right wingers losing followers.

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2 minutes ago, Kilgorehorn said:

I am not familiar with how Twitter woks. Can they remove followers?

In addition to bot removal, all the cancellations of their accounts by outraged Trump supporters in solidarity results in less followers. So it is a loop that feeds the cycle. These media hosts know this. Their outrage is feigned.

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i would assume that twitter has long awaited the day they could remove trump, then sort through how many of his followers were bots, and remove them too.  they just thought that day would be january 20th.

the fact that james woods and kirstie alley think that twitter is just randomly removing thousands of followers from their accounts seems a little...self important?

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17 minutes ago, Kilgorehorn said:

I am not familiar with how Twitter woks. Can they remove followers?

These are most likely removing bots.  When Trump's account was removed, there were probably commands sent out to massive numbers of bots, and the bots were easier to find in the wake of his banning.

Trump never had anything near 88 million followers ('88' is a curious number).

50 or 60 million actual supporters sounds more likely, and that's being nice.

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8 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

It is silly that a private tech company has become such an important comm tool for some leaders especially on the right. However it’s also their fault that they have burned all relationships with the media. Trump can still go on any cnn show at a moments notice but I don’t think they would give him a free microphone to say whatever he wants. They would interview him which he can’t allow. 

The thing is, this isn't like say 50 years ago where say if AT&T and the TV networks cut Trump off, his communication abilities were drastically reduced.

Like you and others said, he could easily walk down to the White House press room, step up to the podium, and it'd be streaming out to millions through YouTube, C-Span, Fox News, CNN, etc.

I have a server I use for hosting various websites and projects.  Within 5 minutes, I could spin up a message board, or even setup a WordPress install with certain plugins/addons that would make it resemble twitter.  Within 15-30 minutes, I could have a domain pointed to it (TrumpSpeaksOut.com or whatever).  Trump could post a link on WhiteHouse.gov, or through his various channels (he has an email marketing team that reaches tens of millions of people, including me for some fucked up reason), and point to that site I setup, and bring my server to its knees as his followers clamor for his words.

The point is, I'm just one dude with a server.  He has the financial and logistical means to setup his own social media platform to actually handle that traffic (he has the servers already - his campaign, advertising, and email servers), using already-existent software, and it'd be up and running within a few hours.  He would control the advertising, he could control whether he wants libtards on it, etc.  

He could say whatever the fuck he wants, an nobody is going to be putting up warning banners about elections have been verified, etc.

Of course, I have a feeling the IT people around him are probably pretty strong in the grift, so they are going to be quoting him ridiculous prices, and I wonder if that's held things up.   I would be disappointed if those IT folks had not been trying to sell him on his own social media platform for the past few years.

Either he's lazy, or he's being cheap.  The irony is that he should have already had it in place, and ready to go.  But he would not have the visibility that he has on twitter, since, unlike twitter, the only people exposed to his message would be those who visit his site.  He loves the fact that he puts out a tweet, and a shitload of non-Trumpkins see it and talk about it.  

That's the reality TV star in him taking over.

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3 hours ago, DDD Dad said:


Calling these morons loons and mentally ill minimizes the actual danger that radicalization from social media and propagandist “news” outlets poses.

The problem is, they are.  I have yet to meet anybody who buys into the qanon stuff, who isn't mentally ill.  Yes, that makes them susceptible to being radicalized, but we have to figure out how to crack that nut and bring them back from the insanity.  Would help if we had a coherent mental health system.

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Somebody quoted this guy earlier.  He is the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

That's bigly.  Very bigly.

They posted this on their site.

https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/understanding-twitter-suspensions-and-the-need-for-consistent-policies/

Quote

On Friday evening, Twitter officially suspended the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, from its platform for violating its stated community policies related to inciting violence and spreading false information. This suspension comes after the heinous attack on the United States Capitol on Wednesday, inspired by the president and his key supporters, following a rally on the National Mall. The protest, which culminated in both violence and rioting, was organized in response to the congressional certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election also taking place on Wednesday. 

Quote

According to the Associated Press, “Twitter has long given Trump and other world leaders broad exemptions from its rules against personal attacks, hate speech and other behaviors.” But since the election in November 2020, many of the president’s tweets were labeled for promoting conspiracy theories alleging election fraud and the stealing of votes as well as encouraging violence. Twitter utilized these warning and fact check labels to inform the public of the potential misinformation, while the content remained available online due to the compelling public interest of having direct access to communication from the president of the United States. 

Quote

Free speech and content moderation

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech for all people. But it only protects citizens from interference by the government. The First Amendment’s free speech protection does not apply to the actions of a third party such as a private social media company governing certain speech. 

Quote

In the case of this particular suspension, a line was crossed when the president knowingly endangered members of the public as well as law enforcement and elected officials by inciting physical violence and destruction. In response, Twitter determined that the potential threat of further violence and physical harm overrides the compelling public interest by which they previously justified allowing the president’s account to remain active and his posted content to remain online even in violation of its policies. And though this was a significant action—the president’s speech is of great importance—it was not a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

Quote

Christians are wise to be vigilant about matters related to censorship. But it is important to recognize that the difference between censoring speech that is disagreeable and limiting speech that threatens or elicits physical harm.

Quote

Going forward, careful attention should be paid to the actions of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook regarding content moderation and censorship, but in itself, Twitter’s decision to ban the President’s account should not be seen as an existential threat to free speech in our democracy.

 

 

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  • immamac changed the title to A story about a pathetic man's downfall
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