The trouble here is that debate with you is impossible because you can't understand the difference between "I'm not a bad person just because I'm fat" and "everyone needs to get fat right now."

Beyond that, I will not get fat merely by being in the same room as a fat person, even if the fat person is telling me that I should get fat. Fat is not contagious. I will not get fat despite proper diet and exercise simply because someone near me is fat, whereas even if I get vaccinated and wear N95 masks, you can still give me Covid if you have it, and it's more likely that you'll have it if you aren't vaccinated and wearing masks.

I get to choose whether or not to become fat after I encounter a fat person. I do not get to choose whether or not to get Covid after I encounter you and you spew coronaviruses at me.

They weren't even ethical during Watergate. They pushed him out very reluctantly, only after the pile of overwhelming evidence got so high that they knew they couldn't talk their way out of it. The difference between the Nixon-era GOP and today's GOP isn't so much that Nixonian Republicans were fine, moral, upstanding individuals. It's more that in Nixon's time, the GOP felt that it had to wear a veneer of ethics in order to trick the public into voting Republican. As evidence, look at 6 short years after the Nixon debacle. Reagan ran on trickle-down economics. His VP candidate famously called it voodoo economics before it was beneficial to him to endorse the policy. Trickle-down was never intended to do what the public was told it would do.

The people pushing trickle-down absolutely knew that the end result would be funneling most of the money into the pockets of the elite few while the rest of society ended up fighting each other for the scraps. That was the intent of the policy. The "everyone will be better off because the money will trickle down" line was a lie from the get-go. Republicans were liars back then, and they're liars today.

The main difference is in what they're lying about. Back then they felt they had to lie about their motivations. They no longer feel that necessary. They're an openly racist party not because they suddenly turned into racists, but because they figured out their base doesn't require them to sell themselves as non-racists. They were just as racist in the Nixon administration, where they eagerly supported the "War on Drugs" - Nixon's campaign to discredit hippies and Black people - as they are today. The difference is that back then, they had to couch their racism in terms that disguised it whereas today, they don't feel that constraint.

The main difference between the GOP of the 70's and that of today is that they've spent the last half century cultivating a racist, know-nothing base who will follow them religiously no matter what, and they did it by targeting, big surprise, religion. They swept up the White southern evangelical vote by coming out against abortion. They're the pro-life party. They're the party of Jesus. And the religious zealots believed them because apparently, they never actually read the Bible in which the Jesus character is history's first progressive.

Their problem now parallels religion's problem. More and more people are turning away from organized religion. As they move away from the hellfire preacher yelling at them about the godless sinners that are the Democrats who are making God punish us with natural disasters because they're too nice to the gays, the GOP loses people who are predisposed to believe and follow crazy bullshit. In short, they hitched their wagon to religious nuts, and now that there are fewer religious nuts it's harder for them to get votes.

And they're responding not by trying to get more than 25% of the Black vote. They're responding by trying to make 75% of the Black vote not count for various bullshit reasons. In short, they've decided if they can't win popular approval, they'll simply eliminate enough opposition such that it doesn't matter.

Yep. Monitor the output, not the process. If you tell your employee to do X by Y deadline, and he does it, then he's doing his job. End of story.

Every job I've ever had, from the professional jobs after college to McDonald's in high school, there was always at least one employee who was very good at making it look like they were working hard while accomplishing almost nothing. The good bosses caught on. The bad ones thought those jokers were rockstars.

Yeah. And the PC is dead, 'cause we're all gonna play KSP2 on our phones. And radio is dead too, remember? They predicted that in the 50's and again in the 80s.

All these "X thing that no one is abandoning is dead" articles are just clickbaity crap - they never come true.

Unless you're playing around on reactionary sites like Reddit, you're full of it. No one thinks a Carter-era Democrat is a Nazi. But an awful lot of people are running around trying to make progressives look like lunatics.

You seem to be one of them.

I don't play on here much anymore, but some of the alt-right shit in this thread makes me wonder about radicalization here. Is it real, or is it Russian trolling?

At any rate, there's an awful lot of stupid cloaked in a thin veil of sounds-reasonable-if-you-don't-think-about-it rhetoric going on around here.

Most likely means whatever they used to get the video is highly advanced, and they don't want their capabilities to get out lest adversaries start working on ways to avoid/defeat it. Showing a video divulges information about the camera used to shoot the video.

And then you'll be a raging dick about it.

For what it's worth, I *have* heard of that first one. And read it, and Sigma's right. Just because you personally have never heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't important.

There's so much wrong with this I don't think I can cover it all.

First, it's not insane to say that Trump is a KGB puppet. It's slightly wrong, in that the KGB was replaced with the FSK, but the FSK is the same bunch as the KGB was. Putin was KGB from 1975 until the Soviet Union collapsed.

It's demonstrably true that Trump defers to Putin. It's demonstrably true that Russia, which is led by Putin, helped get Trump elected. It's demonstrably true that Trump has said, repeatedly, that he doesn't have a problem with the Russians interfering with our elections on his behalf. He's subverting our own electoral system because a Russian dictator wants him to. If that ain't a puppet...

As far as freedom of speech goes, that's wholly irrelevant. Freedom of speech defines what the government may not do as far as controlling what I do or don't say. It has nothing to say about what private entities control while using their systems. Reddit, Slashdot, and any other web forum is free to censor, or not, as they please, because we are conversing in their playground and they get to call the shots.

In saying that you think online sites need to be regulated and forced to adhere to the first amendment, you demonstrate that you don't understand the first amendment. Those online sites also have first amendment rights. They're allowed to dictate what is said on their platforms. Telling a liberal site that they *must* allow Trump-related twaddle on their platform would be a violation of the owners' first amendment rights.

As a final thought, to disclose where I sit on the political spectrum, I don't need to understand why racist toolbags are racist toolbags. I don't care if it's because mommy and daddy told them to be racist, or because a black guy said something mean to them on the playground, or because they got hit in the head and damaged the part of the brain that suppresses dickheadishness. At the end of the day, they're racist toolbags and they're hurting my country and my neighbors.

Put another way, you hear a lot of talk from both sides about how we need to "meet in the middle" to get things done. Nice try, but no. I am not going to agree to be 50% more racist if the racists agree to be 50% less racist. That's a non-starter, for both of us. Meeting in the middle on fundamental questions of morality as we're being told we should be doing is a completely asinine concept.

Still doesn't make sense. Souvenir light sabers look like what people think swords look like, on an Xray machine, but they're explicitly allowed. Anything with a circuit board and some wires will resemble a bomb to the non-savvy, but you can get all manner of electronics through security.

This is just TSA doing what it does best. Making dumb calls in the name of theater. The things don't even look like what people think grenades look like. People think grenades look like knobby eggs with a lever on top. Hell, an 8oz normal water bottle looks a lot more like a hand grenade than these things do. The totally spherical bomb look hasn't been a thing since the Adam West Batman movie.

Yeah, except they repaid the bailout money with money they got from the government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...

Financial shell games don't count.

And that's not touching on the fact that the TARP bailout made sure the banks were on solid ground while the people the banks had screwed were rendered homeless. TARP was a bad program from the get-go, and it was designed specifically to maintain the powerful's wealth on the backs of the powerless.

That argument would have more merit if we had only helped "people" (corporations) like that once. But that's not the case. We did it over and over again. We continue to do it. We continue to give them, and their uber-rich leaders, massive tax breaks, massive givebacks, and we even pass laws requiring the purchase of their products (see: ethanol).

And I note you deftly omitted his reference to waging wars, which we do constantly and to great expense.

If we can afford to bomb brown people and run welfare programs for billionaires, we can afford to feed our own poor people. We simply choose not to, and that paints a pretty clear picture of what kind of people we are.

They made their money as members of a society which provided the infrastructure necessary for them to make money. Our taxes contributed to that society, so yes, we, as in we-the-people - the government, - are absolutely entitled to some of that wealth.

See, the difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" is really that liberals are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit people, but do not benefit themselves personally, whereas conservatives are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit them and everyone else can fuck right off.

I get no benefit from funding homeless shelters. I'm not homeless. No one I know is homeless. I'm solidly upper-middle-class and so if there is a homeless uprising, they're gonna be going for heads much higher than mine. The part of my tax bill that funds programs for the homeless does absolutely nothing for me whatsoever, and yet I don't bitch about paying it because it's something that people need, and I'm happy to help provide it.

Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to bar homeless people from getting into a shelter if they've been drinking or using drugs which based on alcohol/narcotics use rates among the homeless is another way of saying that the Trump administration wants street people to stay out in the cold because by God we're not gonna pay one penny of a heating bill to keep those drunk druggies warm.

The world does not owe me a living, but when I help fund the things the world wants to do, it damn well does owe me some payback, and we can start by not bitching when people who benefit the most from the world that all of us have set up are asked to pay their fair share to keep that world going.

It takes millions of years for plant remians to be buried to a sufficient under-sea depth to even be capable of producing oil. It then takes hundreds of thousands of years for the oil to actually form.

In short, if there was a pre-human industrial civilization 2 million years ago, why didn't they use up all the oil? It's fairly unlikely they *started* their mass-energy production with nuclear or solar. If they were here, then the oil should have been grossly depleted long before we got to it.

Republican leadership doesn't believe it. Their voters believe it, but then many of them also believe Clinton ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement.

The leadership knows exactly what's going on, and exactly what their policies will do, and exactly who their policies will hurt and who they will help. But they also know that even the dim bulbs who vote for them won't like being told that they will be poor for the rest of their lives while their representatives' rich puppeteers will continue to get richer, and so they lie about what their policies will do and who they will hurt.

It really is time we move away from "Republicans want good things for the public, they're just totally wrong in how to bring them about" and recognize that Republicans are very smart, and want to destroy the country as we know it.