spudmunkey
Well-Known Member
Goddamn you, The Onion...
US Political Discussion: Biden/Harris Edition (Rules in OP)
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zappatton2
Well-Known Member
Man, the chasm between parody and reality is so thin these days, you could practically skip between them.
Yeah, I saw that over the weekend. South Korea is saying it isn't true, but almost exactly the same thing happened when Kim Jong-Il died ten or so years ago.
Does anyone know if Jong Un ever had more kids? Last I heard, he only had a daughter. I think he only has one surviving older brother, who was passed over for being too liberally-minded.
The Onion has to step up their game like this, because Trump is too good at sounding like a satire now that he's the world's premier medical expert.
Yeah, typical. I think the most credible sources say he is/was in a vegetative state. Considering the condition they handed over Otto Warmbier in, they might actually consider "vegetative state" to be "perfectly healthy and alive"
Un was a useless little brat when he got the post in the first place. I wouldn't put it past them to give control of the arsenal to a 7 year old girl.
spudmunkey
Well-Known Member
Is fear of being overrun by fleeing citizens from NK the main reason why SK might lie about Un being dead? Are there other motivations?
He was just a figurehead for the regime. Him being alive, dead, or somewhere in the middle changes nothing.
A replacement will be found and then it's back to business as usual.
I could see SK being more cautious given what's at stake, but I don't see this unfolding any differently than when Il died.
SpaceDock
Shred till your dead
I would think Amash supporters are Republican Never Trumpers.
sleewell
Well-Known Member
yep. they probably would vote for him instead of biden or just staying home. every single never trump vote should go to the person who has the best chance to beat trump.
ross perot helped bush win. jill stien helped trump win.
ross perot helped bush win. jill stien helped trump win.
I haven't heard anything yet about what he'll need to get on ballots, or what the polling looks like, but my gut reaction is that if Amash is in there as a legit third party option, it's pretty much guaranteeing a Trump win.
There might be some Republicans that don't like Trump that much, but he's consistently polled in the 80-90% approval range among Republicans. Amash will peel some supporters off, but mostly he's going to appeal to the people who don't like Trump or Biden but aren't progressive enough to be completely repelled by his super-conservative background.
There might be some Republicans that don't like Trump that much, but he's consistently polled in the 80-90% approval range among Republicans. Amash will peel some supporters off, but mostly he's going to appeal to the people who don't like Trump or Biden but aren't progressive enough to be completely repelled by his super-conservative background.
Adieu
Well-Known Member
An unknown but large amount of NK citizens are avid secret consumers of SK media.
If it turns out to be nonsense but unconfirmed SK reports cause unrest in the North, they're afraid it would be viewed as a hostile act of intentional sabotage or worse... information warfare / attempted regime change / act of war.
And if the other side decides to overreact, well, shiiiiit....
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
The first time Ross Perot ran was in 1992, the year Bush lost re-election. The last time Perot ran was in 1996, when no Bushes ran. In 2000, he endorsed the younger Bush and didn't run a campaign, but getting the Reform Party support thrown behind Bush, rather than their own candidates helped Bush win and also destroyed the Reform Party- if that's what you mean by that, but that doesn't really seem to fit your context.
I think that the only states where she theoretically made any difference were PA and WI, but even if HRC had taken those two states, Trump still would have had enough electoral votes to win the general election, although it would have been closer.
Amash hasn't even officially announced anything and it's practically May.
He hasn't even switched his party affiliations to Libertarian (currently Independent).
If [when] he runs he won't even be on the ballet in almost a third of states, including presumptive "battle grounds" of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
America just really loves an underdog story, whether it's long shot mainstream candidates or protest vote fodder for the general. The Amash saga is quite the narrative.
He hasn't even switched his party affiliations to Libertarian (currently Independent).
If [when] he runs he won't even be on the ballet in almost a third of states, including presumptive "battle grounds" of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
America just really loves an underdog story, whether it's long shot mainstream candidates or protest vote fodder for the general. The Amash saga is quite the narrative.
Very hypothetical, but that leads to pretty much the only way I see this helping Biden, which is if Amash stays off the ballot in most of the expected battleground states but does get on the ballot in some red states and effectively turns them from guaranteed Trump wins to 3-way battleground states. Probably not a likely scenario, but kind of fun to think about.
Even if Amash doubles the highest Libertarian Party voter turnout in history it'll still be under 7% of the popular vote, and if anything like previous races, it'll be insignificant as far as the electoral vote.
I agree, it's fun and interesting to think about the "what if" scenarios, but that's pretty much all it is.
It reflects very poorly on the media pushing for this being more than a footnote in this election.
zappatton2
Well-Known Member
An article on the musings of an American psychiatrist regarding the Trump crowd;
https://www.salon.com/2020/04/23/ya...H11nkjzgkplJTwffkvWtKaT2lUSnRsRvah5Qk0DRVVS40
Obviously this is her opinion, but she does highlight one of my main concerns with these folks. There is an inherent undercurrent of violence amongst the fringes of the Trump crowd that I do really worry about should he lose the next election. Trump and these extremist elements are in a feedback loop that is destabilizing the States, and the resultant fear may in fact create violence in the streets, or an even more authoritarian regime should he win. I'm not American, be we do share a border, and this stuff does tend to spill over.
One of my favourite lines in the article, that points out the me-first inflexibility of the American concept of freedom; "Like cigarette smoking, shooting rampages and reckless driving, "freedoms" that endanger lives and curtail others' freedoms are not legitimate freedoms but a public health concern."
It's sort of like the idea that spreading false and harmful information is just the equally legitimate "other side" of free speech.
https://www.salon.com/2020/04/23/ya...H11nkjzgkplJTwffkvWtKaT2lUSnRsRvah5Qk0DRVVS40
Obviously this is her opinion, but she does highlight one of my main concerns with these folks. There is an inherent undercurrent of violence amongst the fringes of the Trump crowd that I do really worry about should he lose the next election. Trump and these extremist elements are in a feedback loop that is destabilizing the States, and the resultant fear may in fact create violence in the streets, or an even more authoritarian regime should he win. I'm not American, be we do share a border, and this stuff does tend to spill over.
One of my favourite lines in the article, that points out the me-first inflexibility of the American concept of freedom; "Like cigarette smoking, shooting rampages and reckless driving, "freedoms" that endanger lives and curtail others' freedoms are not legitimate freedoms but a public health concern."
It's sort of like the idea that spreading false and harmful information is just the equally legitimate "other side" of free speech.
Hmm. I've been seeing a lot in the news lately from bloggers and even mainstream media reporters (opinion pieces) regarding how harmful these conspiracy theories and other looney-bargain-bin-shitposts on social media are just as dangerous as assault, and therefore, not free speech. But, yes, whilst I agree that it's very frustrating to have to see this and whilst people who are too stupid to add two and two together and somehow get the answer of flat-earth or fake-moonlanding... let's take a step back.
What would outlawing this sort of speech solve? Do places that outlaw free speech, like China and Russia, have fewer or less severe misinformational problems?
I think the underlying problem here is that public schools in the USA have sucked really bad for decades now. Stupid kids without decent schooling grow up to be logically illiterate adults.
Also, from a personal standpoint, I've posted things that ended up being wrong before. I absolutely try not to do it, but I think we all make mistakes. Do I need to be punished by a court of law for, say, asserting that Russia did not interfere with the 2016 election, only to later be proven wrong? Also, who then determines what is correct? Is it a team of factcheckers? Is that team apolitical? If not, then, uh-oh, as soon as there are a few Republicans on that panel, we are all going to jail for sure, alternative facts and all...
As far as people self-harming due to misinformation, well, I mean that stuff is coming through mouth of Trump, because he is telling people to take immunosuppressive drugs (HCQ and CQ-P), telling people to insuflate sun light, telling people to inject clorox, etc. What are you even going to do?
Adieu
Well-Known Member
I think it's time to admit the inevitable.
The great experiment has failed, democracy always eventually goes tits up latin american style, and lest we end up with a Chavez or a Pinochet, we might as well just ask Beijing to occupy Washington now and send an interim government of mildly authoritarian techno-bureaucrats.
Then once the appropriate people are shipped off to the looney bin and the fringe ideologies and religions get reeducated thru mandatory community service, we should be mostly ok.
"Freedom" is nice and all in theory, but in practice, society cannot function when harmful lunatics are officially free from mandatory corrective psychiatry. And not just walking around without straightjackets, but actually free to rabble-rouse and stir sh!t and destabilize at will.
FUCK FREE SPEECH, GIVE US FREE MANDATORY CORRECTIVE PSYCHIATRIC INTERVENTIONS INSTEAD.
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zappatton2
Well-Known Member
I would never propose outlawing the expression of opinions, barring unambiguous incitement, hate speech, slander, ect. But I do think it's incumbent on platforms to vet the information they disseminate, and I don't think false information is owed an equal podium in the public space.
It's like when people say that the media is liberal when it doesn't give equal weight to the idea that climate change is not driven by human activity. Well, no. Almost all accumulated scientific evidence points to climate change driven primarily by the mass consumption of fossil fuels. When an institution that is supposed to be a journalistic gatekeeper to the dissemination of factual information is demonstrably spreading conspiracy and distorting facts, calling for accountability in my view is not unreasonable.
