The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

The point is that we should be more concerned with what they are protesting, than the protests. Do I wish they hadn't turned violent? Yeah (though many were instigated by undercover cops, or cops flatly shooting rubber bullets or tear gas at people, or instigated by white supremacists or violent anarchists). But do I blame them for turning violent in some cases, after years of going unheard? No. It's understandable. More understandable than the Boston Tea Party or Boston Massacre.

I can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.  Believe it or not it is possible to simultaneously be furious about George Floyd and furious about the anarchist looters burning down my city.

If the looting and rioting was being done by black folks who are personally affected by this tragedy and the epidemic of police violence in this country, they would be understandable.  If it was people who've been hurt time and time again boiling over in their frustration, it would be understandable.  And that MLK quote you dropped would apply.  Although it would still be wrong and really really bad and worthy of strong condemnation.

But that isn't what's happening here.  Black folks were out in the streets demonstrating in a peaceful, organized fashion.  And their voices were being heard loud and clear.  It was very effective.  Or it would have been.

Then the protests started getting infiltrated by all these dirtbags.  Antifa jackasses, anarchists, communists, white kids from the burbs who think this is their opportunity to overthrow capitalism, professional rioters, and so on (these groups overlap pretty heavily).  It's this underclass of angry, stupid assholes that's existed in America for decades, counter-cultural morons with left-wing extremist viewpoints who glorify rioting and violence and criminal behavior.  They organize themselves into all these little groups and give themselves cutesy names, but at the end of the day the folks tearing up the Seattle downtown right now are the same folks who tore it up in 1999.  Buncha white punks in black masks who want to smash-and-dash the Banana Republic in the name of overthrowing capitalism.

The riot-fetishists honestly are some of the greatest enemies of black people in this country.  Every time black people want to have a peaceful protest and make their voices heard, their protests get turned into riots and their voices get drowned out.  Not through any fault of their own, but because these jackasses just can't miss an opportunity to ruin everything.  Widespread peaceful protest is still a very effective political weapon in America today.  But it only works if you can do it successfully.  BLM is unable to do it successfully because these anarchist idiots have shown up to make it all about their own agenda.

Take it from someone who's been to these protests, this happens time and time again.  You see the same sorts of people.  White, 18-35 years old, dyed hair, lots of piercings, black clothing, masks, backpacks full of weapons.  They'll be there, all loitering together, waiting/hoping for things to turn violent.  They don't care what the issue is.  They just love the energy of civil disobedience and are hoping, praying, for the opportunity to smash things up and shout "f*** the police, f*** capitalism, f*** you mom!"

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

That Hotel California comparison made me re-write the songtext:


On a dark computer night
Cool elections on my screen
Warm colors on the map
Rising up through the polls

Up ahead in the districts
I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy, and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for election night

There OC stood in the doorway
I heard the mouse clicking
And I was thinking to myself:
"This could be heaven or this could be hell"

Then OC put up a take
And he showed me the way
There were voices in his head
I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Forum
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face

Plenty of boards at the Forum
Any time of election year (any time of election year)
You can find it here

OC's mind is secular-twisted
He got the new avatar
He got a lot of pretty, pretty maps he calls freiwalls

How they discuss in the blog
Sweet summer sweat
Some discussion to remember
Some discussion to forget

So I called up the Captain:
"Please bring me my headline"
Virginia said: "We haven't had that spirit here since Obama '08"

And still those voters are calling from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say

Welcome to the Forum
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face

They're living it up at the Forum
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your hot takes

County maps on the ceiling
The red precincts on ice
And she said: "We are all just posters here of our own device"

And in the moderator's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab the trolls with their steely knieves
But they just can't kill the socks

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the logout box
To the place I was before

"Relax," said the KYWildman
"We are programmed to receive
You can log out any time you like
But you can never leave"

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I literally thought this was satire at first. NO WAY could this possibly be real. Then I saw Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny with a SCYTHE. Apparently scythes and TNT are still allowed, but hunting shotguns are verboten in CARTOONS that have had them for DECADES! Guns are core parts of Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam as characters — no reason to even bother having them around without the guns. It’s just cringeworthy.

Obviously the producers of this new show do not in any way speak for liberals broadly let alone the Democratic Party... but good lord they gave conservatives such an easy lay-up of a talking point for absolutely no reason at all. However minor, this is hands down one of the dumbest things I have ever seen happen in the name of “wokeness,” if not THE dumbest. It is downright surreal in its stupidity.

Not a single life will be saved or changed for the better because of this. Not a single kid who saw these old cartoons in the multiple generations they aired failed to understand that guns, or dynamite, or walking off cliffs, didn’t work in real life as they did in them. And even if they did, that would be on their parents rather than the cartoons. This seems indicative of a collective coddling and dumbing down of society that I simply cannot get on board with. And it’s all so, SO unnecessary.

The only effect I know this will have is I’ll make damn sure my kids only ever see the classics I and my parents grew up with. I don’t live under any delusions that hiding what a gun is from kids, or treating them as super scary objects that are to be feared so much they can’t even be portrayed in a cartoon, will lead to anything good. Guns, like sex and all controversial and difficult issues, should be openly talked about and explained to kids frankly in a way they can understand — and they’re smarter that people think. Cowering from the subject entirely does a disservice to them. It does nobody any good whatsoever, in fact.

[Coastal Elitist]

no, they get hit harder because they have poor diets and don't get exercise, like most poor people in the US of any race.  Of course the race baiters would be upset by that too.  The key here is that you must do what the Dems do, only praise black people but never actually do anything to help them.  Who else are they going to vote for, the people that don't praise them and also never actually does anything to help them either?  "lesser of two evils" has hurt African Americans more than it's hurt non-African Americans.

[Boobs]

I'm Skunk and I speak for the transgenders™.

Anyway, I will respond to most of the points made in this thread. Some of these points have already been brought up by others in the thread, and while repeating them will be somewhat redundant, I'll try to make this as comprehensive as possible.

TERFs say nasty things about trans people and outright deny that it is a real phenomenon, with trans women just being men who want to "steal the benefits of feminism" or whatever. Not what she was doing at all. 

Rowling doesn't espouse the typical TERF ramblings directly, but she is at the very least allying herself with them. She describes Magdalen Burns as an "immensely brave young feminist" and a "great believer in the importance of biological sex" when in reality Burns described trans women as being akin to blackface and a fetish.

Now, you can say that this doesn't necessarily mean she's a TERF, but what other conclusions are there to draw when she is hyper-focusing on ways in which the trans agenda is allegedly destroying women's spaces and propping up horror stories of people detransitioning (which is reported in less than 1% of people who transition in UK, and that's ignoring the fact that transitioning in the UK is an incredibly cumbersome process that requires gender therapy session and is extremely hard to obtain for most people) and instead of on the much more common issues of transgender people being victimized and abused in their daily lives?

And as for not saying nasty things about trans people, within the essay, she explicitly compares trans activists calling people TERFs to incels and Donald Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" rant. Does that not qualify?

Her point is that, in a culture where a "woman" can be anyone who calls themselves a woman, there is basically no point in having gender-segregated bathrooms or locker rooms because anyone can walk in and there is no way of knowing whether they belong there or not. This is pretty straightforward and not at all controversial.

If that is her explicit point, then she does a terrible point of making it. She spends most of the essay talking about how trans activists are sending her death threats (which I'm sure some are, and those people are deplorable and should be condemned, but it doesn't make her any more right), how young people are being pressured into identifying as transgender (which they aren't, the recent upward tick in trans children is a sign of society progressing to where trans people feel safer to come out), and talks about her personal experiences with womanhood and what that means for her (which some of the stuff is genuinely disheartening and I am sorry she had to go through the domestic abuse she faced, although this obviously has nothing to do with the topic at hand). Do any of these really have anything to do with her alleged point?

Yes. And some people are born with one eye, or with three arms. But if you ask someone how many arms or how many eyes a person has, they will say "two." The same is true for genders. Acknowledging statistical anomalies does not mean that we must incorporate them into our everyday lexicon.

Yes, most people do have two eyes and two arms. And yes, most people consider themselves to be either male or female and as such children are taught there are men and women. Things are often simplified to make things easier for children to understand, but just because people were told that were three stages of matter in early elementary school, doesn't mean that plasma is SJW nonsense.

And if you want to believe that sex is absolute and binary for simplicity's sake, then fine. Most trans people are perfectly comfortable acknowledging their biological sex and don't wish to abolish it, they just also believe that gender isn't intertwined with it. It's mostly intersex activists who find the sex binary unhelpful for the various reasons Figueira pointed out.

Regardless, sex being binary or not doesn't interfere with your "everyday lexicon". It isn't hard to be trans inclusive with your language, as the author of the article that started the whole debacle did by saying "people who menstruate", thereby including trans men and AFAB non-binary people who menstruate in addition to cis women.

Sure she may be a transphobe or something in other aspects; but saying "women who menstruate" is extremely dumb unless you are talking in a very specific medical sense (which I do not think was the case here).

Again, the phrase wasn't women who menstruate. It was people who menstruate. I agree that the phrase "women who menstruate" would be dumb and not at all necessary, considering menstruation isn't an issue for trans women and as such I don't need to feel included whenever people are talking about it.

However the initial backlash to her seemed to be about saying things or liking tweets that just said "lesbians shouldn't be pressured into attraction to penises" which strikes me as pretty much common sense and find it mind boggling this is even something controversial today.

Honestly, I'm in agreement with this. Nobody should be forced to have a genitalia preference one way or another. However I'll qualify this statement by saying that often times the justification of not being attracted to trans people is because the person does not believe they are the gender the trans person says they are- a justification people use regardless of pre-op or post-op status. If you don't want to have sex with a trans woman because she isn't your type or because you're not really comfortable with penis, that's fine. But if you don't want to date a trans woman because you don't believe she's a "real" woman, then that's transphobic.

However, the "vast majority of people" may not take advantage of this, but apparently nothing is stopping them. Nothing is stopping me-- a 6'3" man-- from "identifying" as a woman and joining the WNBA. Nothing is stopping a man from entering a woman's bathroom-- his behavior might get him kicked out, but apparently the fact that he is in there is not enough to remove him from the premises by your standards. I think there is a way to compromise here that preserves the rights of transgenders while simultaneously rejecting the (obviously wrong) radical idea that anyone can "identify" as whatever they please.

Well, the fact that you're an Atlas poster and not a professional basketball player is stopping you, for one. Maybe you should try identifying as a decent person instead. Aside from the ad hominem attacks™, do you honestly think an organization like the WNBA, which people have to work rigorously for years to be a part of, have athletes that are always in the public eye, have access to extensive background checks for their athletes, etc. would go "drats, foiled again by those SJWs, I suppose we have to admit this 6'3" man in because he says he's a woman"?

I think the key thing here that a lot of the trans movement seems to have forgotten is that there is a difference between biological sex and gender identity. Sometimes your gender identity is the relevant thing. Other times your biological sex is what's relevant, like in elite sports leagues or what bathroom you use, particularly if it's one where people shower or change clothes. You've got people now earnestly calling biological sex a "social construct". Pretty sure no one "decided" that some people would have penises and others would have vaginas unless you believe in god.

Why should biological sex be important when it comes to sports leagues or bathrooms? If you want to ensure fairness- then you aren't going to do that by banning transgender female athletes from competing against women. For starters, this isn't even that much of an issue, considering you hear a lot more about the issue transgender women competing in sports than you hear about transgender women actually winning sports competitions. You'd think if this was such a pressing issue, that would happen more often. And even if you discount that, if you reduce men's and women's sports to being solely based on your sex, you're just going to have transgender men who take testosterone be forced to compete with cis women- essentially creating the same problem to begin with.

And as for bathrooms, I agree with John Dule that we should promote more all gender bathrooms. That aside, the need to ensure that only people of the appropriate biological sex go into the men's or women's room is also pointless and just serves to incite more transphobia. As many, many people have already pointed out, potential sexual predators aren't going to be dissuaded by a sign on the restroom. Aside from that, transgender people are much more likely to be attacked in public bathrooms than cis people. Most of all, as much as people like to think they can easily spot someone who's transgender, you aren't going to be to tell who is or isn't based on who enters. If you still think we need to enforce strict laws that ensure people go to the bathroom based on their sex to accommodate the cis women who feel uncomfortable that a transgender woman may be peeing next to them feel safe, are those same cis women going to feel comfortable sharing a bathroom with transgender men like this guy?

Well, then this is an excellent chance for you to educate us poor toothless hick bigots on what "gender identity" means! Good of you to take this opportunity instead of falling back into smug mischaracterizations and personal attacks.

In the very simplest of terms, gender identity refers to one's perception of their gender. This most often correlates to a person's birth sex, but doesn't always. This is different from gender expression, which refers to how the ways a person presents adheres to their gender identity or not, and gender roles, which refers to the expected social norms that dictates how men and women in a society typically present and behave. All of this information and sources can be found on Wikipedia's page for gender identity, which you can read in your own time if you're actually interested in the subject.

Do you have a "right" to be a woman that was denied to you by your chromosomes? Of course not. It sounds like your problem here is not with me-- it's with God, physics, nature, or whatever other universal motive forces you happen to believe in.

Ignoring the first two points which are laughably hollow and immature, I'll concede the in your view I don't have a "right" to be a woman. I do however have a right to use which bathroom I please, right to choose to undergo hormone replacement therapy to help alleviate gender dysphoria, and right to call myself a woman, live as a woman, and enter women's spaces should I choose- regardless if some transphobes take issue with that.

Now, from this point on, somebody else can take it from here, because I think I've said more than enough on this subject.

[YE]

What is so hard to believe?

We are in the midst of the worst jobs crisis in our lifetimes.  We are in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of ~120,000 Americans.  We are in the midst of civil unrest, including massive protests sparked by murder of a non-violent black man by the police and captured on video.  Trump may not have caused these specific events, but the severity of the aftermath can be directly attributed to inaction/incompetence by the President and his administration.

Some of the actions Trump has taken over the last few months:
-Claimed that the virus would magically go away
-Ordered peaceful protestors tear-gassed so that he could do a photo op at a church
-Suggested that Americans could protect themselves from the virus by injecting bleach
-Touted a drug as a miracle cure for the virus, despite a lack of evidence
-Consistently contradicted the advice of experts with regard to the pandemic

I can see the above (and many more) actions directly alienating:
-Older Voters
-Younger Voters
-Black Voters
-Asian Voters
-Religious Voters
..and all of the people that care about them.

And how many voters has Trump gained during this period?  What undecided voter could look at the President's actions over the last few months and decide that Trump was the answer...to anything?

And note that Trump was significantly behind Biden even before these events occured.  Trump was only polling close to Biden during a brief period of time during the primaries (prior to SC) where Biden was struggling.  Before that, and during a period of relative economic prosperity, Trump was behind Biden by significant margins.

Given the above, is it really hard to imagine that Trump is significantly behind Biden at the moment?  I would never believe a single poll, but looking at things in the aggregate and I do not see anything from polling that is inconsistent with what I would expect in the current environment.  

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Wow. It is difficult to emphasize just how really insane and terrible this man was. Best case scenario, he was a land-hungry warmonger who lacked the wisdom and perspective to understand how incredibly destructive his presidency was for the country. He most certainly is not underrated; the obsession high school history classes have with Polk as the "one good Antebellum president" is revisionism at its worst. In reality, Polk was an incompetent fool blinded by ideology and his own hubris whose legacy was saved only because those under him had the good sense to ignore his instructions at key moments.

Giving Polk credit for seizing the Southwest from Mexico is like giving Robert Oppenheimer credit for inventing nuclear power. At this point we might as well make the best of the situation, but it was not a good thing when he did it —and the short-term consequences (i.e. the ones he could have and should have foreseen) were the genocide of the native peoples and the fracturing of the Union, leading directly to the deaths of well near a million Americans as direct or indirect casualties of the Civil War. Pretending Manifest Destiny had nothing to do with slavery is simply ignorant of the actual historical record. (Read the Packenham Letter, for goodness' sake.) But even if you take the accelerationist view and praise Polk for accidentally hastening the end of slavery, his presidency is full-up of unforced errors (for instance, his veto of the Rivers and Harbors Act, which did grave damage to internal commerce), more than enough to bury any president.

If you want an unsung Antebellum president to lionize, Taylor is a far more deserving subject —a fact Polk bizarrely seemed to recognize in a roundabout way when he made his career for him and then tried (without success) to destroy it.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Nobody was stopping the United States from killing the Indians.  The reason we didn't kill them is because we didn't want to.

Except we did kill them, almost all of them, for centuries. This country was born out of a genocidal campaign of conquest and exploitation and built on stolen land. The United States has attempted to erase the stain of this original sin by providing its residents with piss-poor education in history, of which you appear to be one of the victims.

I did not bother engaging seriously with your post because it seemed to be a bad-faith attempt to "own the leftists," which has come to be synonymous with anyone who does not share your rose-tinted view of American history. For example, you deliberately selected the lowest death toll published by any serious historian, which I can only conclude is an attempt to minimize the severity of a genocide. You then proceed to hand-wave away deaths from causes any less proximate than a bullet to the head — deaths from cholera, for instance, that would clearly not have happened if the deceased had not been forced from their homes and intentionally marched through areas of cholera outbreaks, are dismissed as part of the "natural death rate during a forced migration."

Your post seems to rest on the idea that there is a meaningful moral distinction between the level of callous disregard necessary to create genocide-like conditions and the actual act of committing a genocide — that people being forced from their homes and marched until they died from disease or starvation or exposure is somehow morally less bad than their being rounded up and shot. Egregious failure to halt a genocide, borne out of an utter contempt for the lives of the subject population, does not seem to me to be, morally speaking, all that much better, and making a long post splitting the difference between the two seems evidence of a deeply depraved and unhealthy mind.

[MATTROSE94]

Trump’s latest irresponsible actions and his cultist crowd increasingly resemble Hitler’s final moments in his bunker, as the Allied forces advanced on Berlin ...

[Joe Republic]

What Trump should do is go old school by standing on a stump or a box in the middle of an open field (or road), and give his rambling speeches that way:

Step right up, folks! Hyyyyyyydroxicloroquine! What's hydroxychloroquine, you say? It's Dr Don's patented patent medicine. Got the lupus? We'll keep that wolf at bay. Malaria? This is some Belle Aria! Got the 'rona in Barcelona? Covid's not morbid with these beauties!

You, sir! Come on up. What's your name? Don Jr? What a coincidence! We've never met before today, correct? Folks, this young man...has coronavirus. Don't flee, don't panic, there's no cause for alarm...with Dr. Don's hydroxychloroquine! See! He's cured already!

These pills can be yours, but there's a limited supply, and the next town over's interested. Act quickly...

[fhtagn]

Conservatives? No, I disagree.

Racists, Nazis, and neo-Confederates? Yes, I agree.

What if they are doing this privately? You can't really criminalize someone from having hatred of someone else. Everyone hates somebody.

See, this is where your phony moderate veil falls apart. You pretend to be a true centrist and then someone says "society should not accept racists and nazis" and you respond with "well, wait a minute--"

You're not a centrist, you're an appeaser. You're fine with the status quo, even if that status quo includes making room for some of the worst ideologies our world has ever known. We should not accept bigotry. Not even privately. "Everyone hates somebody" is not a valid response to "racists and nazis have no place in society." If I were to say "Yankee fans have no place in society" and you said "well, Yankee fans would feel the same way about you, a Red Sox fan, because every sports fan hates some other sports fan" then you'd have a valid argument.

Just because you can't criminalize hatred does not mean that we should accept it as a society. There should be social consequences for bigots. I wouldn't advocate for killing or arresting nazis, but I am 100% okay with shutting them out so that they don't feel welcome, either in the discourse or in society at large. The fact that you're willing to split hairs and be a pedant about that is telling.

Oh please, this bs righteous indignation falls flat considering the Marxists are literally redefining "bigotry" and "racism" daily to fit their political needs. Once you claim zero tolerance for some vague, nebulous idea with perpetually moving goalposts without looking at the idea as a spectrum, that leads to nothing but abuse as autocrats try to shoehorn any thoughts they don't like into that shifting definition to censor opponents. That you abandon any nuance in this ridiculous crusade is also telling.

If Archie Bunker were real are you really suggesting he be fired and boycotted and suffer all manner of societal death simply for being stupid and ignorant? One of my best friends named his son Lee Thomas after Lee and Stonewall. Should he be fired never to hold a job again?  I know hundreds of people who own Confederate imagery. Is everyone of them an irredeemable racist who should have their life destroyed in this evil purge?

Bigotry of any kind is a spectrum. This very recent anti intellectual nonsense that there can be no nuance with "racism", that theres no difference if a bigot wants to kill all minorities, or just doesn't like all minorities, or just doesn't like some minorities, or maybe even is just insensitive and doesn't care that much about avoiding edgy comments despite not actually hating minorities, or maybe just makes an offcolor joke with no intent to hurt someone's feelings, or now just rejects the lie that America is fundamentally racist because muh systemic oppression, is idiotic. Racism is not black and white (no pun intended) and these absolutist, moralistic hot takes are absurd. Free speech is fundamental and unthinking mobs of self-righteous jerks trying to censor and suppress using poorly defined buzzwords and marxist rhetoric is sickening.

[S019]

Are they nuts? Grant is literally the second best Republican  after Abe, with Reagan and Ike following distant third and fourth

"They" is like 4-5 ignorant kids.

Why are we spending all these pages talking about them and trying to educate them?  99.99% of Americans disagree with the notion that U.S. Grant should be cancelled for being a slave owner.  All this "history lesson" stuff is just preaching to the choir.

I can't wait until some idiot Berkeley anarchist boy gets the idea to go tear down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, then brag about it on TikTok because "Abraham Lincoln wanted to kick all the black people out of America."  We're gonna have everyone in the media spending days going "ackshually Lincoln was good" and endlessly litigating the details of Lincoln's Liberia idea.  And then we'll have a big ole thread on Atlas full of blue avatars going "the left has lost its mind now they are tearing down statues of Lincoln."

It’s not 4-5 ignorant kids it’s a coordinated effort to demonize our history by cultural communists and The NY Times has helped legitimatize these people too

As someone who is on the left, I promise you it is not a coordinated effort.

Here's what happens:
1: Some people in Mississippi pull down a statue of Jefferson Davis stepping on a black man's throat while doing a sieg heil.
2: A video is posted online showing the teardown and subsequent celebrations.  It goes viral and receives a lot of positive attention because seriously, why is that statue a thing.
3: NYT columnists use it as fodder for boring thinkpieces about "by tearing down this statue are we losing our history?"
4: A couple of white kids in Berkeley who want to be internet famous see all this attention and say "hey, we can do that too!"
5: Problem is, there are no confederate memorial statues for the Berkeley kids to tear down.  So instead they find a statue of Anne Frank, tear it down, justify it with some lame excuse about her being "problematic", and post it on the internet expecting to get praise.
6: Everyone on the internet, including their close friends and family, says "you're a f***ing idiot, don't tear down Anne Frank statues."
7: The video goes viral because everyone loves to dunk on these stupid kids who hate Anne Frank.
8: Some NYT columnist sees the opportunity for clickbait.  Article title "Is Anne Frank Problematic?", article content "No."  OSR is MASSIVELY triggered by the existence of this article.
9: Fox News: "Leftist mobs tear down statue of Anne Frank.  Will Joe Biden and the radical left stop at nothing to destroy our history?"
10: Trump:  WE WILL NEVER BOW TO THE LEFTIST MOB

[RINO Tom]

Trump’s latest irresponsible actions and his cultist crowd increasingly resemble Hitler’s final moments in his bunker, as the Allied forces advanced on Berlin ...

Bro, we have a smart one liners and simple truths thread ... this is for quality effort posts.

[GeorgiaModerate]

If he hasn't lost your vote now, he never will. At this point, I can only say this to my fellow American right-wingers: Every second that Trump spends in the Oval Office is a loss for us. He's cruel. He's unempathetic. He's ignorant, and worse than that, he shows no enthusiasm for rectifying his ignorance. He is stupid. He blames everyone but himself for his failures while trying to take full credit for his successes. He has never read a security briefing. He has never read the Constitution. He is crass. He is racially insensitive. He is a serial sex offender-- if I had a daughter, I would never let him within ten feet of her. He is a slave to special interests. He is nepotistic. He embezzles your tax dollars. He has turned compulsive lying into a reflex. He told Xi Jinping to keep building concentration camps. And perhaps worst of all, he has no loyalty to America or to its people-- he thinks only of himself. If you were honest with yourselves for even a moment, you'd admit how obvious it is. He does not care about capitalism, meritocracy, human rights, social fabric, morals, tradition, or any of the other things we claim to value. He is in this for his personal aggrandizement and enrichment. He is the physical manifestation of the American Id.

Every second that Trump spends in office poisons the youth of this country against the Right. The drooling boomer rubes of this country have chosen him as their mantle, and now my entire generation will associate the word "conservative" with "Trump" for the rest of their lives. You have driven them into the arms of the Sandernistas, all so you could "send a message" to "the elites." There is no making up for what you did in 2016. The only possible redemption comes on November 3, 2020. But from there, it doesn't really matter, because one way or the other you're still off to the nursing home.

If you vote Trump in 2020, you are a bad person. No exceptions. No excuses.

[Calthrina950]

Now that was a great post!  Well done, Calthrina

I'm only now noticing that the post was preserved here. I'm glad that it was.

[S019]

OK, this thread is by and large just a puerile waste of time to make fun of extreme woke parlance, but how the f**k are evictions not violence? Like, the Dules of the world are free to call it legitimate violence (every political ideology has its own definition of what violence is and isn't legitimate), but surely if words are to have any meaning then physically removing a person from a place against their will is clearly a violent act?

Have you ever been a landlord?

Well, let's say there is a union construction worker who works for 20 years until he has financial freedom. He didn't graduate college or even high school, he did it the old fashioned way he came from nothing and he made something of himself, he worked 6-7 days a week 12 hours a day, he would make around $75,000 to $115,000 in any given year. In 2010 his father dies and he inherits his home, with what that worker has saved through his years of work and the inheritance he received from his father he is able to buy 2 more homes one for $19,900 that had been foreclosed upon. The man puts about $5,000 into the house to give it a new roof, make sure the flooring is nice, and to increase the quality of life. In the summer of 2011, the guy rents out this home to a person and all is well for a couple of years, sometimes the renter falls behind on his payments, but he always makes them up, then in the summer of 2012 something happens, he stops paying and then month after month this keeps happening so after three months the property owner begins the eviction proceedings and then one day in the fall goes to check out the house and there is nobody there and the door is wide open. So the property owner goes into the house and he finds a great big nothing. The appliances the property owner had supplied were gone, the ceiling fans were gone, the light switches were gone, the walls were smashed up, and the furnace was smashed. So the property owner calls the police, the police say that they will look into it. Now the property owner, who had been a working-class Joe his entire life who is trying to get higher in the ladder, now is out of 3 months rent, thousands of dollars of appliances and repairs, and a tenant. See we don't have to think of this as a hypothetical because it really happened to my father, everything in this is true and it happened in the timeframe given. And the landlords are the bad people.

So yes, Antonio and the rest of the forums residents woke Socialists, I'm sorry that you feel that a person taking a risk and spending their own capital to provide a service to others is a monster. Life is not rosebuds and candy for landlords, they are people and 99% of them are people who have worked hard to get where they are in life.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Remove the word diversity and replace Seattle with Pretoria and you'll see how close the wokies have come to literally arguing for re-instituting racism.

The sad part about this is that racism is a social myth we all collectively created. Reinforcing the idea that skin color matters in any regard only furthers the myth and pointing out that 'it matters to some' and 'its very real for many people' only begs the question. The entire past few months has served to worsen race relations which is entirely predictable given Americas solution to literally every problem is always 'attack it' even when it's painfully obvious doing so is massively counterproductive.

Ultimately, these sorts of things only make wealthy white liberals feel good about themselves because its a lot easier for Becky in HR to think she's making a difference by separating people who are 'inherently perpetrating systemic racism by nature of their birth (not racist at all cuz they're white and colonialism wuz bad n stuff)' which wastes time that could be spent advancing actual policy that will help ensure equality under the law and more equal economic outcomes...because policy is nuanced and difficult and thinking that much tends to hurt ones head.

Its partly why I don't care that much at this point about the national debate on this sort of thing. Its clear America is so ass backwards on how to fix this problem that its much better to continue trying to make your own little world as good as it can be and not stress about the fact that people keep poking a bear in the eye and wondering why its biting them. More so than ever I remain convinced that people who are massively ideologically engaged, particularly now, are simply more miserable people than those who don't give a toss and go about living their lives with humility and kindness.

[S019]

AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are extremely dumb, with a sprinkling of truly nasty beliefs (in Ilhan Omar's case especially).

This is known.  We've known it for a while.

Unfortunately, in this cycle especially, they are too entrenched and popular and well-funded by the Justice Dems to be removed in a primary.  And their districts are Safe D, so they are not going to flip to republicans.

Most of us want them gone just as much as you do.  That's the annoying thing about these splinter left organizations like Justice Dems and SocAlt.  They raise tons of money and then focus it all on a small set of low-profile races because their goal is to create celebrities, not to actually get anything done.  The amount of money spent on AOC/Omar races is unreasonable for a congressional primary with only tens of thousands of voters.  But winning the primary matters a lot more to them than it does to everyone else.  So they dump all their money on it.  Same with Sawant here in Seattle.  She raised millions and millions of dollars from all around the country to eke out a narrow victory for a city council seat over some local gay dad type.

Maybe one day we'll get the opportunity to kick them out, just like you were finally able to get rid of Steve King.  But until then, stop pretending like they speak for any significant portion of the Democratic Party.  They are just firebrands out to get attention and money for themselves and their small constituency of grifters and wingnuts.

[free my dawg]

This comparison is highly offensive and downplays the actual atrocious views that Steve King has (at least with AOC). This is not a good post by any means of the imagination.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

This comparison is highly offensive and downplays the actual atrocious views that Steve King has (at least with AOC). This is not a good post by any means of the imagination.

Steve King and Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar is a pretty fair comparison.  King and AOC isn’t even if AOC is still an awful grifter

[free my dawg]

This comparison is highly offensive and downplays the actual atrocious views that Steve King has (at least with AOC). This is not a good post by any means of the imagination.

Steve King and Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar is a pretty fair comparison.  King and AOC isn’t even if AOC is still an awful grifter

Per my previous posts refuting MacArthur, I actually agree with you (hence "at least with AOC"). I've actually evolved on whether Omar is an anti-Semite or not. I gave her the benefit of the doubt before, but after learning about her past, more explicitly anti-Semitic statements, I really can't anymore.

I admittedly don't know much about Tlaib's controversies aside from the right wing's Holocaust smear, but I'm certainly not going to criticize you (or any Jewish poster, really) for thinking the comparison's valid.

[Coastal Elitist]

They are using unmarked cars because the Mobs in the streets are attacking and vandalizing police cars.  It's an appropriate tactic in the face of a lawless, Marxist mob.

People have committed crimes during the violence in major cities.  Those who have need to face the criminal penalties for these acts.  The hysteria is deception, and is a means the left is using to assist the Marxist Rioters guilty of crimes to avoid prosecution.  I'm very definitely not OK with that.  These people are not peaceful protesters; they are persons committing crimes.  And the municipalities where they are committing these crimes are simply not enforcing the law.  Why taxpayers and ordinary citizens should be OK with that is beyond me.

[NewYorkExpress]

They are using unmarked cars because the Mobs in the streets are attacking and vandalizing police cars.  It's an appropriate tactic in the face of a lawless, Marxist mob.

People have committed crimes during the violence in major cities.  Those who have need to face the criminal penalties for these acts.  The hysteria is deception, and is a means the left is using to assist the Marxist Rioters guilty of crimes to avoid prosecution.  I'm very definitely not OK with that.  These people are not peaceful protesters; they are persons committing crimes.  And the municipalities where they are committing these crimes are simply not enforcing the law.  Why taxpayers and ordinary citizens should be OK with that is beyond me.

This shouldn't be here. If Black Lives Matter is Marxist, than logically, every black person is a communist.

Since that isn't true, that post by Fuzzy Bear should not be here.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Doesn't seem to be a popular take in this thread but I'm still tilting personally a tad towards Omar in this race. It is not my district, and whatever the will of MN-05 is will probably be for the best. I'm not even gonna touch Omar's love life in this post since quite frankly I think it's mudslinging.

Do I believe Ilhan Omar personally is an anti-Semite? No. Do I believe Ilhan Omar has propagated anti-Semitic tropes which basically anyone in public office should know better than? Yes. I don't wanna do the "SHE ENDORSED A JEW FOR PREZ HOW COULD SHE BE AN ANTI-SEMITE??" meme but I'll try to explain my position. I don't give a damn if you're trying to refer to AIPAC's campaign contributions if your take on a pro-Israel lobby is "It's all about the Benjamins baby" you have a problem. That's not even mentioning the duel loyalty trope allusion which is also deeply concerning. However, I think this is mainly an issue of rhetoric than of genuine vitriol for the Jewish people.

Left-wing anti-Semitism is a real thing and it must be identified and squashed from especially the progressive movement. There is a line that has to be treaded carefully between legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and genuine anti-Semitism. Betty McCollum who has been mentioned in this thread several times does a great job of doing this, and that's by being clear and specific. If you say "Israel is and has been throughout its history committing human rights abused on their border with Palestine" you are being clear and specific. If you say "AIPAC advocates for militaristic policy in the Middle East which I do not support" you are being clear in specific. If you say "The Zionists are controlling U.S. foreign policy using AIPAC and have all our politicians on their payroll" your qualm seems to be more with Jewish people than the governmental policy of the State of Israel. The word "Zionist" specifically has become a neo-Nazi dogwhistle for all Jews and should be avoided.

In conclusion, I'd like to note I'm big on in-district small contributions (only in-state on OpenSecrets sadly) being the most important part of a campaign. AMM has that edge, and it isn't even close. If he wins, I have no doubt he will be a good legislator. If Omar wins, I hope she changes her ways.

[Badger]

They are using unmarked cars because the Mobs in the streets are attacking and vandalizing police cars.  It's an appropriate tactic in the face of a lawless, Marxist mob.

People have committed crimes during the violence in major cities.  Those who have need to face the criminal penalties for these acts.  The hysteria is deception, and is a means the left is using to assist the Marxist Rioters guilty of crimes to avoid prosecution.  I'm very definitely not OK with that.  These people are not peaceful protesters; they are persons committing crimes.  And the municipalities where they are committing these crimes are simply not enforcing the law.  Why taxpayers and ordinary citizens should be OK with that is beyond me.

The sh**tpost thread is that way.