ndawg

Yeah but these people's lives went absolutely nowhere during those decades of "corruptocrats" ruling things. Now, with Trump, they might be part of something that, I dunno, makes something happen for them. Or at least for Trump, and that means they can at least bask in his reflected glory. I guess that beats decades of futility.

Nobody here wants the Supreme Court to act as a super legislature.

Yes, regale us about the most vile shit possible.

You know, everyone here can see what you reply to and what you ignore. And, because I think you also need this reminder, "ignore" is where the word "ignorance" comes from.

The system that failed to hold Trump in check -- that has actually allowed him to openly attack the election process in broad daylight, mind you -- for the last four years will magically start working if he wins again?

Don't worry, once the next news cycle starts, they'll be back with something brand new and salacious about Biden that is headed in the direction of possibly mattering.

He could always sell his investments in McDonald's before his term began.

And short-sightedness / failure to plan for the future is a hallmark trait of sociopathy. Enchubben lives in a world where he willingly votes in the interests of his bosses, and his bosses also vote in their own interests. The only people in his world who are looking out for Enchubben’s interests are the people he’s arguing with. I feel really bad for people who think like this. I also hate that I feel bad for them, because they are as responsible as anyone for this mess. Three days before the fireworks start. I hope for Enchubben’s sake as well as ours that he doesn’t get his way.

That thought has nothing to do with the question I asked. There is a difference between merely continuing a conversation with more words and actually considering an idea that's been presented to you. You are also exhibiting incredibly binary, bipolar thinking. Since you're invoking religious imagery, I'll use that to illustrate. Let's presume the opposite of "the devil" might be "Jesus" (AKA someone who is utterly sinless). Put any two human beings next to a mythological figure of perfect, blameless action and thought, and we'll all seem like scumbags. Similarly, the earth and moon seem really close to one another when shown in the same frame as, say, Neptune. Now, remove the idea of a perfect human being out of the spectrum, and then compare the corpus of widely published knowledge about the very public lives they've actually lead. Suddenly, Joe Biden looks squeaky clean by contrast. Yet a small amount of extremely flimsy evidence is all it took for you to become more concerned about the fitness of Joe Biden's character for the job than Trump's. I'll put this through another lens, too. Suppose you had to actually trust your life savings and the safety of your family to one of these people. You are no longer weighing their characters in a vacuum, you have to actually make a life or death decision based on your judge of their characters. Gut check: who would you trust? There are many reasons Biden was not my first choice for president, but integrity and honesty are strengths of his.

I didn't say that both sides are corrupt, I called into question Enchubben's rationale for ignoring Trump's corruption. I think you owe @Anastasis an apology.

So, to be clear, your decision to apply a looser standard to the Trumps than the Bidens is that Trump... has a history of corruption and grift that predates his political career, and Joe Biden does not?

Do you think the government should force companies like Spotify to air controversial speech?

It's also a testament to the capability of social media to envelop massive swaths of people within a shared hallucination. We joke about MAGA as a death cult, but in reality, that term might actually understate the danger. Cults have real world limits on their ability to spread. Traditional cults are more like Ebola... they turn people into mindless zombies so quickly their friends and family nope out of the batshit before the initiates can reel too many of them in. In a rather is-this-reality-or-a-simulation type move, I think that the MAGA "death cult" spread more like COVID. Because the only fundamental idea that is necessary to transmit MAGA from one person to another is that liberals are evil, it's core message is compatible enough to our shared reality that the normal social disconnection never happened. Which means it could infect a much, much larger population before the rest of civilized society could really understand what was going on and put a stop to the batshit. As they get more and more estranged from the external material world, they're now all becoming more and more psychotic at the same time. But whereas when one person experiences psychosis all on their own, the people around them generally step in to put a stop to it, what happens when millions of people experience psychosis together? What about when a good number of them are gun owners? We'll be finding out soon enough. Y'all can pump sunshine all you want, but I know I'll be on the ledge until further notice.

Damn, fivethirtyeight.com has Trump at 50.6% and Biden at 48.5% right now. Your numbers weren't so close to theirs a few days ago.

It's the bucket you throw yourself in because you willfully ignore the reality of who -- and what -- it is you're supporting.

Well that's a fun typo.

Damnit! Cast aspersions. LOL

Right. Bear in mind, he can easily cast dispersion on every state that is close simply by raising doubt sufficiently about a few close states where he's poisoned the well. In this crazy election, convincing landslides in the battleground states like Pennsylvania are more important than running up the electoral vote score.

One thing to consider is that Trump may very well cause voter shenanigans that appear to hurt him, particularly in places that he's likely to win convincingly anyways. If he can point to voter fraud that helps Biden, he can make the case to cast the whole state's outcome in doubt, and get good PR on two fronts -- he can not only say he rightly predicted that there would be voter fraud, but ALSO appear magnanimous because he's pointing out cases that helped his opponent. Trump has been blustering about wanting a clear winner declared on election night, but it seems like he's most helped by election night ending with chaos.

It's heading in the direction of possibly mattering!

There needs to a "-1, please check in to a rehab clinic for your own sake" rep option.

I don't think this is much of a mystery, to be honest. Think of the term "loser" for a second. Who do we apply that term to? It's not necessarily people who don't have a lot of material success -- there are plenty of people who don't have much going for them by worldly standards but are nevertheless content. Because they're content, they're not really "losers." When I think of who we call "losers," what comes to my mind are people who are not content with what they have, and believe they deserve more. Because of ineptitude, they cannot attain whatever measure of status they feel they deserve. Maybe they want to be a fit, attractive person but can't stop binge eating and can't settle in to a workout routine. Maybe they fancy themselves a great businessperson but they can't manage money and get suckered into bad debts. Perhaps they want to be a respected intellectual but they don't have the attention span to earn a degree. If you could tune in to their internal dialog, I think you'd hear someone who believes they already are a winner according to whatever identity they've adopted -- charmer, businessperson, intellectual, etc., and they are in complete denial of the much more limited person they really are. Trump "tapped in" to white losers. Racism and xenophobia is a drug for them. It provides these losers with an infinite supply of external reasons for their lack of real world results. As a consequence, their denial is trivial to sustain. Trump is also one of those losers, but in one of the most bizarre twists of fate in human history, the entire Kingdom of Loserdom somehow managed to get him elected into the most powerful position on the planet. He embodies their denial, but magically turned into truth. He's their grandiose delusions made into reality. He is the loser whose wishes for glory came true.

I'd listen in.

"The Hunter Biden story was headed in the direction of potentially mattering, but unfortunately it just ran out of time!"

Wow. This is quotable.