The Truman Tavern of Simple Truths and Smart One-Liners 33 1/3: The Final Insult

[Sol]

You can't even say the Cuomo takes aged poorly because they were so obviously deranged even at the time. It would be like if there was a thread from 2016 where everyone agreed that Trump is the smartest and kindest man to ever run for president. That wouldn't have aged poorly because it was never based in reality.

[S019]

Shocking how many Republicans are willing to stand up to Trumpism when they know the MAGAts won't track them down and kill them for voting against Mango Mussolini.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Okay so, taking into account this vote and the ones on impeachment and on overturning the election, the GOP caucus breakdown is roughly as follows:
- 10 people who are actually willing to do what it takes to stand up to fascism
- 60 or so people who aren't willing to actively go along with fascism, but also aren't willing to do anything to stop it.
- 80 or so people who privately oppose fascism, but will publicly go along with it out of political expediency.
- 60 or so people who are fully committed fascists.

Sounds about right.

[S019]

It is only fitting for the citizens of Alabama that Tommy Tuberville gets Mo Brooks as a companion in the Senate. 

[brucejoel99]

It's almost unheard of for a 25+ year old non-smoker to pick up cigarette smoking. The vast majority of people start as teenagers, so anything to make tobacco products less available to them is a good thing. Vaping, while almost certainly less harmful than smoking, is still addictive (in my experience, even more so due to convenience), and there's no good reason for them to have a different minimum age than combustible cigarettes, as their main benefit is harm reduction.

[VAR]

It's not like she does.

[S019]

Terrible take, although I can understand the sentiment. Trump (and Trumpism) absolutely has a future, much like cancer has a future: terrible, destructive, an immense human cost, and hopefully eradicated utterly as soon as possible (but likely will be around far longer than we'd like).

[S019]

Gun control has always been racist.

This is true.

This is my main issue with pro-gun leftists claiming to want to improve peoples' lives. You can't improve peoples' lives, if some deranged lunatic shoots everyone dead. Like haven't we seen enough mass shootings to realize maybe...just maybe....guns don't actually belong in the hands of everyday people. Oh, alas, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years for people to actually come to their senses, this is the single issue that frustrates me so much, because the thinking on it is just so disconnected from reality on the part of the gun advocates, oh well.

Guns do belong in the hands of the people, but anyways, in a country like the United States, taking away all guns is just never going to happen, mass confiscation, given the number of firearms in the United States, is near impossible no matter how much some people may want it. And getting past that, keeping guns out of the hands of the population isn’t necessarily going to stop shootings/violent crime etc...

So defeatist to say you can never do it so you might as well not try.

Obviously the first step is to drastically curtail the number of guns produced and sold, as that is out of control. If you're in a hole, stop digging.

Then we can start to talk about banning the ownership of the types of guns that have been used to massacre innocent people over the past four decades.

The overwhelming majority of gun violence is committed with handguns. Do you intend to ban the ownership of pistols?

Production first, and then ownership.

Ridiculous. You want to shut down an entire industry and forcibly confiscate material from hundreds of millions of people? And do you think criminals and terrorists who want to commit mass murder wouldn’t stop at nothing to gain access to weapons through illegal means, that they would allow government enforcement and laws to stop them?

Hell yeah I do. Have you thought about this for more than ten minutes? Dude, if the guns aren't being produced and sold in America, that starts to diminish the supply from the get go.

"Illegal guns" that your criminals and terrorists have their hands on mostly just started out as legal guns bought by American rubes.This myth of a wide-scale criminal operation to replace guns is just an NRA talking point to justify their existence (they are a gun industry lobbying group.)

You also do realize that most people who have guns don't have the manpower or firepower to go up against the entire government, right? I mean, what the f*** are we paying for with a military more expensive than the whole European continent's if we can't bring down Judd Clampett and his closet full of 30-30 Marlins?

But the current status quo of selling millions of guns a year basically without limits is the chief cause of gun violence and our monthly massacres. As I said, if you want to get out of a hole, stop digging.

Absolutely agree. It’s really depressing to see red avatars repeat inane NRA talking points about gun restrictions. America is the only country where mass shootings are a regular occurrence, and it is the only country with firearms-on-demand. And we’re supposed to believe there’s no link between the two? Give me a break. In countries with harsher gun restrictions, the only criminals with guns are those in organised crime, and they only use their weapons on each other, not ‘civilians’. Random psychos looking to murder schoolkids are going to find it much harder, in fact nigh-on-impossible, to get their hands on weapons of mass murder if sensible gun controls are in place. The other alternative is that one is willing to tolerate mass shootings as a necessary price to pay for...what exactly?

[Badger]

If Texas were as committed to their infrastructure as they are to high-school football, then they'd be golden.

[S019]

And people somehow still believe that Republicans are more willing to vote for Democrats than the other way around.


Would a Democratic governor of Nebraska ever have this approval rating? Not a chance. Not even if he campaigned on building a wall.

Ben Nelson won almost every county when he got reelected to the Senate in 2006 against Pete Ricketts (our current GOP governor). I don't think that that's possible for now, but before 2010 Nebraska had a long history of electing Democrats throughout the 20th century.

Yes, I know. I was emphasizing that there has been a change in recent years.

In recent years Republican party essentially disappeared. The Trump's party took it's place and most past voters...

[President Johnson]

The kinds of scandals we didn't have under Mr. Donald J. Trump. To the best of my knowledge, Lindsey Graham didn't bite anyone physically.

[Badger]

I mean he has already been prosecuted, but I don't think they'll convict him.  There will be riots because a lot of people don't understand our legal system, and think burning down a 7/11 will change it.

The left currently believe that if the left wing hivemind believes you to be guilty, you are guilty. No other proof is needed. And this type of thinking is supported by "moderates" such as Joe Biden.

I believe Chauvin is guilty because I watched him murder Floyd on video with my own eyes, not because of the "left wing hivemind".

[S019]

White Supremacist says racist things is the generic headline you can run for basically anything an elected Republican official says.

[brucejoel99]

I don't think it's reasonable to compare midterms to presidential years.  Midterm elections are less ideological in general and tend to be either "I'm mad at the world and blaming the incumbent" or "Thank you for getting us through this crisis."

[Badger]

Yeah, Bezos is obviously several millions of times more awesome and hard-working than the average American. Totally makes sense.

again, you don't seem to understand what "value" means in a market economy. If I work 24 hours a day digging  a hole in the middle of the mojave desert, am I deserving of a huge sum of money? Nope.

Similarly, whether you like it or not, someone who happened to buy a stock and see it absolutely soar in price still deserves that capital gain. They didn't steal it from anyone.

Who is deserving of the money if a house soars in value, if not the homeowner?

Who is deserving of the money if some antique you own soars in value, if not yourself?

Who is deserving of the money if you bought bitcoin in 2011 at 45 cents, if not you?

A stock is like a painting, a house, or some other asset. It is something that has value. The person who happens to own that stock is who benefits from that rise.

I would pay you to dig that hole in the Mojave if we filled it with copies of Mises' Human Action and any other Austrian claptrap that passes off tautologies like these as the height of profundity.

cc Burn Ward Thread

[S019]

Libertarians are freaks.

[S019]

There literally hasn't been a florida gubernatorial race decided by a more than 1.1 point margin since 2006  and DeSantis scraped to victory by a tiny 0.4% margin but sure it's Safe-R cause muh Atlas memes despite 2 of those election taking place in terrible years for democrats.

Remember how the Wisconsin blue wave in 2010 destroyed republican in the state cause it voted for Obama by 13 points in 2008.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

White Men and conservatives are the most discriminated against and disrespected people in American society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not to be taken seriously.

Yeah, I think we can be relatively sure that SAC is a troll

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

The ADL does not have to answer for the actions of every Jew on the planet. Such a suggestion is ludicrously anti-semitic

[Badger]

Credit where credit is due.

Pro-tip everyone: “Forming a study commission” is a polite way of saying “we’re not going to actually do anything about this.”

[S019]

Dictator Joseph taking our guns away!!1!

Anyway, the pro-gun faction just needs to ask why there are so few deaths from guns in all of Europe or even in Canada. There needs to be something done about this epidemic.

[KoopaDaQuick 🇵🇸]

I can consider myself normal sexually

Are there any living women who can attest to that?

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

I have three that need to be preserved:

We know the suburbs were... very different just 20 years ago. Significantly less tolerant, more backward/reactionary, etc.

Demographic change is certainly a thing, but some of these places have swung by 40-50 points to Democrats since then. It’s quite hard to believe none of these people voted Dem in either 2016 or 2020.

What do you all think?

Many of them died?

San Diego County used to have many, but they were old and died.

They're dying in Escondido, CA.

[GeorgiaModerate]

I'm just trying to wrap my head around the world where 30,000 dollars a year is vastly overpaid but $250,000 dollars a year will be left in ruin with a marginal increase on capital gains taxes.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Context:

That's almost historical revisionism. The communist regime in North Vietnam invaded the sovereign country South Vietnam for the purpose of uniting the country under a brutal dictatorship, with the help of the Soviet Union and Red China. Not that the Saigon regime was great, but still superior to the North. The United States helped that country to maintain its sovereignty and win a propaganda battle in the context of the Cold War.

While the US better should have withdrawn in 1965, it annoys me that certain people pretend everything bad that happened was only on America. There were many, many diplomatic attempts under the Johnson Administration alone to negotiate a peace if the North simply accepted the South's sovereignty. They never cared about a diplomatic solution, committed war crimes as well and sacrificed many thousands of their fighters on purpose; like knowing the Tet Offensive was going to fail militarily, but send their boys to death anyway. Let's not pretend this is a one way street.