(07-04-2018, 11:04 AM)bfine32 Wrote: How's bout when folks try to suggest he was the reason behind a man that had a long standing feud with a certain newspaper to the point he suggested they should cease breathing before Trump was even a candidate finally cracks and goes there and kills innocent folks? Is that TDS.
I wouldn't have made that point. Maybe it is. But that this narrative even comes up actually is partly on Trump still, as I see it. He did call the media the enemy of the people, and even though I agree that this probably had nothing to do with this attack, it's still not helpful to the overall climate by any stretch of the imagination.
I get your stance, I'd still also love to hear folks like you admit he should never have said those things.
In short, yes blaming Trump specifically is exaggeration and I'm not on board with that, but one shouldn't lose sight on the fact he did and does say inflammatory stuff. As for that last statement, I guess I can say that without being off.
(07-04-2018, 11:04 AM)bfine32 Wrote: That's just one of many irrational example I can point to. To suggest Trump's Presidency has not cause many to lose a portion of their rational thought (aka TDS) is not a good point.
I didn't make such a point. There's a lot of exaggeration, but I still can't see these exaggerations as the bigger issue compared to the crude things Trump actually really does and especially says.
When you mourn the climate, I think you can't leave Trump out of it. His behaviour plays a huge part in that.
(07-04-2018, 11:32 AM)hollodero Wrote: I wouldn't have made that point. Maybe it is. But that this narrative even comes up actually is partly on Trump still, as I see it. He did call the media the enemy of the people, and even though I agree that this probably had nothing to do with this attack, it's still not helpful to the overall climate by any stretch of the imagination.
I get your stance, I'd still also love to hear folks like you admit he should never have said those things.
In short, yes blaming Trump specifically is exaggeration and I'm not on board with that, but one shouldn't lose sight on the fact he did and does say inflammatory stuff. As for that last statement, I guess I can say that without being off.
I didn't make such a point. There's a lot of exaggeration, but I still can't see these exaggerations as the bigger issue compared to the crude things Trump actually really does and especially says.
When you mourn the climate, I think you can't leave Trump out of it. His behaviour plays a huge part in that.
Trump's behavior plays a large role in it. No one is denying that.
(07-04-2018, 11:56 AM)bfine32 Wrote: Trump's behavior plays a large role in it. No one is denying that.
Additionally, he's a celebrity who is now president. Other than Reagan who left showbiz to be a politician before becoming president, how often does someone so widely known attain such a high office? Think of the most polarizing left-wing celebrity you can think of being elected president and then asking his/her detractors to put aside what he or she has been doing for decades and "give it a chance."
Even beyond the fact that our society has been love-hating Trump (in that odd way we love-hate so many famous people) for so long, there have been specific jokes over the years spoofing the idea of Trump being president, in the Simpsons, or a Trump parody dictating society via Old Biff in Back to the Future II and so on.
I've already heard some people groaning over the idea of Oprah being president, and I don't blame them for having preconceived notions because it's Oprah...she's well known. They aren't making such pre-conceived notions for the glut of unknown democrat politicians who will actually run.
(07-04-2018, 11:32 AM)hollodero Wrote: I wouldn't have made that point. Maybe it is. But that this narrative even comes up actually is partly on Trump still, as I see it. He did call the media the enemy of the people, and even though I agree that this probably had nothing to do with this attack, it's still not helpful to the overall climate by any stretch of the imagination.
I get your stance, I'd still also love to hear folks like you admit he should never have said those things.
In short, yes blaming Trump specifically is exaggeration and I'm not on board with that, but one shouldn't lose sight on the fact he did and does say inflammatory stuff. As for that last statement, I guess I can say that without being off.
I didn't make such a point. There's a lot of exaggeration, but I still can't see these exaggerations as the bigger issue compared to the crude things Trump actually really does and especially says.
When you mourn the climate, I think you can't leave Trump out of it. His behaviour plays a huge part in that.
Good post.
As I also said earlier: The fact that these is even a discussion about a POTUS's verbal attacks on the media should be a concern. But to some it is not as long as no one actually has acted out on them.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(07-04-2018, 11:32 AM)hollodero Wrote: I wouldn't have made that point. Maybe it is. But that this narrative even comes up actually is partly on Trump still, as I see it. He did call the media the enemy of the people, and even though I agree that this probably had nothing to do with this attack, it's still not helpful to the overall climate by any stretch of the imagination.
I get your stance, I'd still also love to hear folks like you admit he should never have said those things.
In short, yes blaming Trump specifically is exaggeration and I'm not on board with that, but one shouldn't lose sight on the fact he did and does say inflammatory stuff. As for that last statement, I guess I can say that without being off.
I didn't make such a point. There's a lot of exaggeration, but I still can't see these exaggerations as the bigger issue compared to the crude things Trump actually really does and especially says.
When you mourn the climate, I think you can't leave Trump out of it. His behaviour plays a huge part in that.
Trump's behavior plays a large role in it. No one is denying that.
(07-04-2018, 11:56 AM)bfine32 Wrote: Trump's behavior plays a large role in it. No one is denying that.
Oh I feel quite a lot of folks are completely denying that. Maybe I'm wrong, and all those rally attendees and MAGA hat wearers and FOX commentators etc. are way more critical than they let on, but I have my doubts.
You're not denying that, that is true. You didn't even vote for the guy, I'm aware of that. Still, the way you focus on TDS and exaggerating liberals makes me wonder if you're not trying too hard to compare a mouse to an elephant. (Trump's behaviour being the elephant.) If I'm asked what I consider to be the bigger problem in the current US climate, I wouldn't think twice and point to Trump, not at those who despise Trump. And putting the existing hyperbole aside, I see most of the reasons to despise Trump as being perfectly valid.
This is an opinion piece, talking about a couple of books and the findings the books present. Here is the part that I found interesting and really wanted to share:
Quote:In another important new book, “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable,” the veteran political analyst Bill Schneider notes that while polarization did not begin with President Trump (it “has been going on for at least fifty years”), Trump “uses every issue, every policy, every tweet, to set one group of Americans against another.” Divisions around issues related to immigration, race and culture serve the president’s interests.
Ah, but because increasing numbers of Americans identify as independents, isn’t there an eager nonpartisan middle waiting to rescue us from all this?
Sorry, but no. As Abramowitz shows, most people who identify as independents lean toward one party or the other. When it comes to casting ballots, “leaning independents as well as strong and weak party identifiers are voting more along party lines than at any time in the past half century.”
Factoring out independents who tilt toward a party, “only about 12 percent of Americans have fallen into the ‘pure independent’ category, and these people are much less interested in politics and much less likely to vote than independent leaners.” Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers.
And the centrist heavenly chorus is off-key in another respect: While it sings mournful songs about the major parties becoming “extreme,” Abramowitz’s data make clear that the two sides are not equivalent. Republicans have moved significantly further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.
Just some fun food for thought to throw out there.
"A great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will soon cease to be either great or a democracy..." - TR
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - FDR
So now that we know this was a campaign by the Russians to once again manipulate Trump supporters into gleefully pushing their agenda and talking points to uproot our Democracy, does it change anyone's opinion?
Or are we still going to yield to these supposedly America first Americans doing the dirty work of our Nations enemies?
Quote:"Success doesn’t mean every single move they make is good" ~ Anonymous "Let not the dumb have to educate" ~ jj22
(07-09-2018, 03:07 PM)jj22 Wrote: So now that we know this was a campaign by the Russians to once again manipulate Trump supporters into gleefully pushing their agenda and talking points to uproot our Democracy, does it change anyone's opinion?
Or are we still going to yield to these supposedly America first Americans doing the dirty work of our Nations enemies?
"Russians"? Is that code for gay hair dresser now?
What the heck kind of "dog whistle" you tryin' to sound here?
Volson is meh, but I like him, and he has far exceeded my expectations
(07-09-2018, 09:50 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Wait, are you saying that gay hairdressers are manipulating Trump's base? I KNEW IT!
I don't know about that. But, it sure seemed like the guy I was replying to was inferring that the gay hairdressers were being manipulated by the Russians..
Volson is meh, but I like him, and he has far exceeded my expectations
(07-09-2018, 09:53 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I don't know about that. But, it sure seemed like the guy I was replying to was inferring that the gay hairdressers were being manipulated by the Russians..
Ida know...Trump's supporters started by getting all weak in the knees because Putin was such a strong, shirtless, take-control kinda hunk. Now Trump comes in and he's a bad boy who just takes and grabs what he wants. Oh god yes, CONTROL US! YOU'RE SO MANLY!!!
Whoops, sorry I got carried away for a moment there.
(07-09-2018, 09:53 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I don't know about that. But, it sure seemed like the guy I was replying to was inferring that the gay hairdressers were being manipulated by the Russians..
The gay hairdresser may be legit. Russian Bots are just manipulating the traffic in order to make it look like is a real following.
Arc Digital has made the same connection in the “strikingly similar” tweets pushing a “familiar narrative” of Democratic “bullying.” Arc traced the campaign from a Facebook group in May and subsequent tweets whose traffic suddenly began to explode late last month.
Amplification of tweets by bots does not necessarily mean content is created by Kremlin-linked operators. But bots typically grossly exaggerate Twitter traffic — and influence — by replicating chosen messages tens of thousands of times.
The aim of such a campaign is to manipulate public opinion by “gaming online algorithms” to rocket content to the top of internet searches, noted Arc Digital.
(07-13-2018, 08:14 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: This guy seems pretty genuine. I seriously doubt that any Russian bots inspired his opinion. Worth the listen.
For a guy who talks about doing research this guy is about as stupid as they come.
2. I can't tell if he is against strong drug laws or in favor of them because he seems to switch back and forth, but Barack Obama was the one who signed the "Fair Sentencing Act" that removed the large disparity between penalties for powder cocaine (whites choice) and crack (blacks choice)
3. Barack Obama was never anti-police. That is just right wing rhetoric. I can post multiple quotes by him to prove this and he never supported any anti-police legislation.
4. The African American community benefitted greatly from the ACA act and they will suffer more than whites as it is dismantled by Donald Trumps administration.
5. Obama signed an executive order increasing aid to HBCU's by $850 million over ten years. That is much more than Trump has done for HBCUs
6. Panned parenthood does much more than promote abortion. That is by far the most ignorant comment he makes. Planned Parenthood provides all sorts of reproductive health care and will even provide referrals to adoption agencies for women who want to have their babies but can't afford to raise them. Planned Parenthood aids poor women so of course they are going to be in poor neighborhoods. And unplanned children are one of the biggest causes of remaining in poverty.
7. More minorities came off of public assistance during the Clinton administration than during any other time in history.
8. The unemployment rate for blacks dropped more under Obama than under Trump.
The lesson here is not to tell people to do research when you don't have a clue what you are talking about. And I have saved the best one for last. Here is the story of the "Award" Trump was supposed to have won from the NAACP
A photograph of Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks that the founder of Trump’s “diversity coalition” hailed as evidence the Republican nominee won an “NAACP medal” for “helping America’s inner cities” was actually taken at an awards ceremony organized by a business associate with an ethnic grievance.
William Fugazy, a politically well-connected businessman who later pleaded guilty to perjury, gave the awards to Trump and 79 other people, most of them white, to protest the awarding of “medals of liberty” to a group of 12 recent immigrants that included a Chinese-born architect, a Costa Rica-born astronaut, a leading expert on the psychology of race, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but no “Irish, Italian, or Polish” people.
The NAACP has not awarded any medals to Trump for “helping America’s inner cities,”. Nor have any other civil rights groups, according to Trump’s biographers.
Basically this guys sounds EXACTLY the type of person who was influenced by Russian propaganda. His "research" seems to be limited to lies posted on facebook. He certainly did not consult in legitimate sources for all this BS.
2. I can't tell if he is against strong drug laws or in favor of them because he seems to switch back and forth, but Barack Obama was the one who signed the "Fair Sentencing Act" that removed the large disparity between penalties for powder cocaine (whites choice) and crack (blacks choice)
3. Barack Obama was never anti-police. That is just right wing rhetoric. I can post multiple quotes by him to prove this and he never supported any anti-police legislation.
4. The African American community benefitted greatly from the ACA act and they will suffer more than whites as it is dismantled by Donald Trumps administration.
5. Obama signed an executive order increasing aid to HBCU's by $850 million over ten years. That is much more than Trump has done for HBCUs
6. Panned parenthood does much more than promote abortion. That is by far the most ignorant comment he makes. Planned Parenthood provides all sorts of reproductive health care and will even provide referrals to adoption agencies for women who want to have their babies but can't afford to raise them. Planned Parenthood aids poor women so of course they are going to be in poor neighborhoods. And unplanned children are one of the biggest causes of remaining in poverty.
7. More minorities came off of public assistance during the Clinton administration than during any other time in history.
8. The unemployment rate for blacks dropped more under Obama than under Trump.
The lesson here is not to tell people to do research when you don't have a clue what you are talking about. And I have saved the best one for last. Here is the story of the "Award" Trump was supposed to have won from the NAACP
A photograph of Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks that the founder of Trump’s “diversity coalition” hailed as evidence the Republican nominee won an “NAACP medal” for “helping America’s inner cities” was actually taken at an awards ceremony organized by a business associate with an ethnic grievance.
William Fugazy, a politically well-connected businessman who later pleaded guilty to perjury, gave the awards to Trump and 79 other people, most of them white, to protest the awarding of “medals of liberty” to a group of 12 recent immigrants that included a Chinese-born architect, a Costa Rica-born astronaut, a leading expert on the psychology of race, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but no “Irish, Italian, or Polish” people.
The NAACP has not awarded any medals to Trump for “helping America’s inner cities,”. Nor have any other civil rights groups, according to Trump’s biographers.
Basically this guys sounds EXACTLY the type of person who was influenced by Russian propaganda. His "research" seems to be limited to lies posted on facebook. He certainly did not consult in legitimate sources for all this BS.
fredtoast, I truly believe that you are the textbook definition of SJW.
Good luck to you, in all of your future endeavors. As I'm sure in your job, where you live, you are forced to represent many deplorable people who likely don't agree with some, or most of your political views. However, I'm sure that they find your teachings enlightening.
Volson is meh, but I like him, and he has far exceeded my expectations
Quote:The #WalkAway meme is what happens when everything is viral and nothing matters
By Abby OhlheiserJuly 2Email the author (Picture illustration: Kacper Pempel/Reuters) On the pro-Trump Internet last weekend, the #WalkAway hashtag was the nexus of an exciting idea: that “millions of Americans are walking away from the Democrat party,” as one pro-Trump account put it. Breitbart said that the hashtag had gone viral; the Epoch Times said it represented a “growing movement” of Democrats — particularly minority Democrats — abandoning their party, and liberalism.
#WalkAway, the hashtag, went viral this weekend, as something of a delayed reaction to a popular video renouncing liberalism by Brandon Straka, who described himself to the Epoch Times as a New York hairdresser and aspiring actor. The video, posted in late May, now has more than 1 million views on Facebook. In it, Straka says he was once a liberal, but now he is not.
“If you are a person of color, an LGBT person, a woman or an American immigrant, the Democratic Party wants you to know you are a victim,” Straka says in the video. “This is perhaps the Democratic Party’s greatest, and most insidious, lie.” ADVERTISING
“I am walking away. And I encourage all of you to do the same. Walk away,” Straka concludes. The video was meant to spark a movement; this weekend’s going viral of the hashtag has been cited as proof that Straka has succeeded.
As the Internet fragments, our understanding of what it means to go “viral” has become complicated, and increasingly meaningless. A hashtag claiming to capture a movement among liberals has gone viral, in this case, almost exclusively on the right-wing Internet, as a reinforcement of one of its binding ideas.
There’s little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions — or even thousands — of Democrats to the Trump Train since Straka’s video. Instead, the #WalkAway hashtag is going Conservative Internet viral on the same hope driving recent pro-Trump support of Kanye West: that the country is on the verge of a mass conversion to conservative thought, a Great Awakening of sorts. And the thing about anticipating an awakening is that it never actually has to happen for the idea of it to go viral.
[‘The mob can’t make me not love him’: How Kanye West joined the pro-Trump Internet] One of the most viral #WalkAway tweets, for example, read as the generational reverse of the “woke toddler” meme: Image via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, captured July 1. The tweet had more than 16,000 retweets by Sunday. However, as my colleague Dave Weigel noted, the account appears to be a bot, an impersonation or both: @sofialimited’s profile picture was stolen from a book cover by someone with a different name. The account has since been suspended from Twitter.
Other viral tweets on the hashtag came from real people who aren’t exactly recent converts. Another popular #WalkAway tweet comes from CJ Pearson, a teen who describes himself as “the left’s youngest nightmare” on his website. His #WalkAway tweet has more than 10,000 retweets.
Quote: CJ Pearson
@thecjpearson
The Democratic Party is the party of slavery. The party of Jim Crow. The party of segregation. The party of the KKK.
Pearson has been right-wing Internet famous for a while now: The teen helped to campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in 2015, and has gone serially viral for his videos and Twitter stunts targeting former president Barack Obama.
By Monday, the conversation about #WalkAway followed two familiar, diverging lines of thought: Conservatives were praising the hashtag as proof of a mass conversion in the works, one that they accused Twitter of artificially suppressing from its “trending” tab. Meanwhile, others were pointing to evidence that the hashtag itself was being amplified artificially by bots to seem bigger than it was.
#WalkAway went viral because anticipating a mass conversion of Democrats to its side is an idea that the pro-Trump Internet loves to share. Those who represent the possibility of this conversion become conservative celebrities.
When Kanye West tweeted praise of Candace Owens — a conservative commentator who believes that black people have been brainwashed by the media to vote for Democrats — the right-wing Internet saw an opportunity for a mainstream prophet, whose huge platform would bring around the End Times for liberalism.
When PewDiePie, a YouTuber with more than 50 million subscribers, followed Alex Jones’s Twitter account, the Infowars personality aggressively courted him for an interview on his show. If Jones could reach PewDiePie’s young audience, the movement could grow.
The pro-Trump Internet is really good at convincing its audience that going viral signals popular opinion, that its movement is and always will be #winning. In this case, #WalkAway is the answer to the possibility of a Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. It doesn’t need to be true to be effective. After all, the hashtag has now become an article in The Washington Post.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Interesting how one of the reasons cited for Trump winning in 2016 was that Hillary and the left-wing had erroneously convinced themselves and their voters that the election was a layup, and now we see the spread of the misinformation that Trump is gaining zounds of supporters who did a 180 from their left-wing roots.
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