A story about a pathetic man's downfall [34 Felony Convictions]

[YGIFS 19,449]

You obviously don't know the same war criminals I do.  Several of them are Trump's short list for Surgeon General, should he be elected again.

[Thrawn 538]

3 hours ago, longhornmatt said:

assuming he’s not dead by then.   

[We’reTexas 1,473]

6 hours ago, David Dennison said:

 

 

[C-Man 27,187]

5 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

 

[RomaVicta 29,902]

 

Donde esta El Greggo Abbotto? No esta bien para las familias de Latin America.

I expect Abbott to announce that he will be putting mines in the Rio Grande and using a trebuchet send the ones that get through back to Mexico.

I just found out we had our own navy,

Just who the fuck do they think they will be engaging? Absolutely nuts.

[Disco Strangler 1,866]

 

Has this ever happened to you? The men are wearing your wife's underpants and you can't be a man anymore, and you've got to be a little sissy and cry about everything, and then the real men swapped out your toilet for a toilet just for farts.  Has this happened to you?

[Ghost of LL 15,531]

3 hours ago, Red Five said:

When this is all over (when he's dead), we'll need to have a serious conversation as a country on how this happened. Like Germany post-WW2.

70+ million people in this country voted for someone who is uniquely unqualified for the job as President. Like, if you made up a list of all the qualities a President simply cannot have, he's got them all. They are his dominant traits.

 

Serious conversations about unpleasant things in our past is not something Americans do.  For the really big things, we don't have serious conversations.  We come up with myths.  Like "slavery was contrary to America's founding principles and ideals" and "the Civil War was over states' rights."  Those can be unpacked by academics.  But in the popular imagination of America and a place and Americans as a people, those myths hold sway.

But for the lesser unpleasantries, they go to a Land of Forgetting.  Like, there was an entire anarchist terrorist campaign in the United States that killed a bunch of people between about 1890 and 1941.  But we learn nothing about that in school.  The closest we get is Sacco and Vanzetti, who were actually innocent.  But there were actual anarchists who actually killed people (including a president).

Trump is going to be consigned to the Land of Forgetting.  There will be no truth and reconciliation.  We don't do that.  It's not our bag, baby.

[atomheartbevo 89,627]

4 hours ago, longhornmatt said:

but it’s in the same sense that cancer is what upsets doctors the most, Satan is what upsets actual Christians the most, and the Emperor is who triggers the Jedi the most).

The word you are looking for is “sand”.  

Sand is what triggers the Jedi the most.

[Bodhi 1,123]

3 hours ago, Red Five said:

When this is all over (when he's dead), we'll need to have a serious conversation as a country on how this happened. Like Germany post-WW2.

70+ million people in this country voted for someone who is uniquely unqualified for the job as President. Like, if you made up a list of all the qualities a President simply cannot have, he's got them all. They are his dominant traits.

 

My hope is that a lot of this will be solved in the upcoming 10 years when a bunch of old people die.  Anecdotally, those people in my family retired, are bored, and decided to spend their golden years binge watching Fox and being angry about a bunch of things that don't remotely impact them (e.g. Drag Shows when you live in rural Iowa).  Hopefully the next generation of olds will be more jaded and less susceptible to media sensationalism.  Wishful thinking I imagine.  

[Francisco 2.0 32,387]

16 minutes ago, Bodhi said:

My hope is that a lot of this will be solved in the upcoming 10 years when a bunch of old people die.  Anecdotally, those people in my family retired, are bored, and decided to spend their golden years binge watching Fox and being angry about a bunch of things that don't remotely impact them (e.g. Drag Shows when you live in rural Iowa).  Hopefully the next generation of olds will be more jaded and less susceptible to media sensationalism.  Wishful thinking I imagine.  

 

I've been hearing for the last 30+ years how the olds are going to die off and and Republicans will suffer electorally any day now.   For some strange reason, the young un's keep replacing the Team R olds when, well, they turn old.

Yeah, yeah.  Demographics and whatnot.  It hasn't changed much.

 

 

Edited July 31, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

Serious conversations about unpleasant things in our past is not something Americans do.  For the really big things, we don't have serious conversations.  We come up with myths.  Like "slavery was contrary to America's founding principles and ideals" and "the Civil War was over states' rights."  Those can be unpacked by academics.  But in the popular imagination of America and a place and Americans as a people, those myths hold sway.

But for the lesser unpleasantries, they go to a Land of Forgetting.  Like, there was an entire anarchist terrorist campaign in the United States that killed a bunch of people between about 1890 and 1941.  But we learn nothing about that in school.  The closest we get is Sacco and Vanzetti, who were actually innocent.  But there were actual anarchists who actually killed people (including a president).

Trump is going to be consigned to the Land of Forgetting.  There will be no truth and reconciliation.  We don't do that.  It's not our bag, baby.

We used to, back when our leaders had spines.  

There's a national monument at Manzanar, for instance.  The idea was that a great country can acknowledge its flaws and learn from them.  That time has apparently passed.

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

The word you are looking for is “sand”.  

Sand is what triggers the Jedi the most.

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

56 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

unpleasant things in our past is not something Americans do

When did you learn about Red Summer?

I was full grown. It was not mentioned ever. 

[Ghost of LL 15,531]

15 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

We used to, back when our leaders had spines.  

There's a national monument at Manzanar, for instance.  The idea was that a great country can acknowledge its flaws and learn from them.  That time has apparently passed.

Yeah, there's a national monument in the desert.  But if you asked 100 Americans what Manzanar is, how many do you think would answer correctly?

Our leaders don't have spines and never have, because spines aren't rewarded at the ballot box.  Fairy tales are what the people want, and that's what they're given.  You think any Texan wants to hear about how the Rangers were basically a state-sponsored terrorist organization geared toward ethnic cleansing?  Or Minnesotans want to hear about how Native Americans were basically genocided under the Nelson Act?

Fuck no.  And if you say those things in Texas or Minnesota, you're not going to get broad agreement that they're true.  That's because such things have been consigned to the forgetting.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,508]

19 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

lost georgia, pennsylvania, arizona 

Trump also led to Georgia electing a Jewish candidate and African-American to the senate. In Warnocks case, he won twice. In an odd way, Trump has been the most effective Democrat politician since Obama in ‘08.

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

Yeah, there's a national monument in the desert.  But if you asked 100 Americans what Manzanar is, how many do you think would answer correctly?

Our leaders don't have spines and never have, because spines aren't rewarded at the ballot box.  Fairy tales are what the people want, and that's what they're given.  You think any Texan wants to hear about how the Rangers were basically a state-sponsored terrorist organization geared toward ethnic cleansing?  Or Minnesotans want to hear about how Native Americans were basically genocided under the Nelson Act?

Fuck no.  And if you say those things in Texas or Minnesota, you're not going to get broad agreement that they're true.  That's because such things have been consigned to the forgetting.

Well at least there was a president willing to acknowledge it.  At some point.  In the past.

[Ghost of LL 15,531]

19 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Trump also led to Georgia electing a Jewish candidate and African-American to the senate. In Warnocks case, he won twice. In an odd way, Trump has been the most effective Democrat politician since Obama in ‘08.

Fuck Obama.  We lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures during his presidency because he actively undermined state parties and fundraising.  And it's the gerrymandering that resulted from that negligence that causes us so much difficulty today.  Republicans have supermajorities in legislatures in places like North Carolina and Wisconsin entirely because of Obama's failures.

15 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Well at least there was a president willing to acknowledge it.  At some point.  In the past.

I mean, I guess.  But making a national monument in the desert isn't really starting a "serious conversation" in my book.

But I guess maybe points for trying.

[Hank Scorpio 17,729]

Screw CRT, we need to teach kids about the Texas Rangers. I was in my 30s when I first heard about the Texas Rangers originally being a group of white trash jihadists who roamed the countryside looking for Indians to murder and were then given the deadliest weapon in the world to do it even better. 

[MrBig 5,381]

1 hour ago, Bodhi said:

My hope is that a lot of this will be solved in the upcoming 10 years when a bunch of old people die.  Anecdotally, those people in my family retired, are bored, and decided to spend their golden years binge watching Fox and being angry about a bunch of things that don't remotely impact them (e.g. Drag Shows when you live in rural Iowa).  Hopefully the next generation of olds will be more jaded and less susceptible to media sensationalism.  Wishful thinking I imagine.  

You must not have any younger relatives who are Trump fanatics. Their level of enthusiasm for Trump is like nothing I’ve ever seen. They put the olds to shame with their level of devotion.

[atomheartbevo 89,627]

2 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I expect Abbott to announce that he will be putting mines in the Rio Grande and using a trebuchet send the ones that get through back to Mexico.

I just found out we had our own navy,

Just who the fuck do they think they will be engaging? Absolutely nuts.

Let me introduce you to our former Governor, Rick Fucking Perry and our navy and air force 

And he doesn’t limit himself to the water, and he knows how not to lead them so much

[Upgrayedd 5,810]

1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

Yeah, there's a national monument in the desert.  But if you asked 100 Americans what Manzanar is, how many do you think would answer correctly?

It’s on the way to Mammoth.

[Bodhi 1,123]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

I've been hearing for the last 30+ years how the olds are going to die off and and Republicans will suffer electorally any day now.   For some strange reason, the young un's keep replacing the Team R olds when, well, they turn old.

Yeah, yeah.  Demographics and whatnot.  It hasn't changed much.

 

 

 

[SydneyCarton 48,054]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

The word you are looking for is “sand”.  

Sand is what triggers the Jedi the most.

That was one specific Jedi, sir. 

[MC Fresh Breath 4,074]

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

We used to, back when our leaders had spines.  

There's a national monument at Manzanar, for instance.  The idea was that a great country can acknowledge its flaws and learn from them.  That time has apparently passed.

I recently read a book of essays by the late Barry Lopez.  In one of the essays he pointed out that while there is a Holocaust museum in DC, there is no national museum dealing with Native American genocide.  I don't think I knew 1/32nd of the amount of horrors we inflicted.  Outside of some random college courses, it really isn't taught or acknowledged. 

[WhatTheBuck 28,775]

2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Trump also led to Georgia electing a Jewish candidate and African-American to the senate. In Warnocks case, he won twice. In an odd way, Trump has been the most effective Democrat politician since Obama in ‘08.

And they both expanded the membership of the KKK. 

[bolverk 29,655]

1 hour ago, longhornmatt said:

Yeah, the only demographics factor is when you have more young people or more old people than normal.  Young people as a group inevitably tend to end up more left leaning, and then those same young people as a group tend to shift more right leaning when they get old.  Rinse and repeat. 

 

I wish this old, overstated canard would die already. How many of you have actually gotten more conservative over the last decade? So many of y'all claim to be former Republicans that have moved away from the party that I'd find that hard to believe.

tl/dr: The general political zeitgeist of the time in which you came of age is the biggest predictor for your lifelong ideology and, therefore, voting behavior. Three separate studies cited below bear this out.

 

Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age?

Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, although several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Using data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, we analyze attitudinal change over a major portion of the adult life span. We document changes in party identification, self-reported ideology, and selected issue positions over this time period and place these changes in context by comparing them with contemporaneous national averages. Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.

 

The Great Society, Reagan’s Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting

We build a generational model of presidential voting, in which long-term partisan presidential voting preferences are formed, in large part, through a weighted “running tally” of retrospective presidential evaluations, where weights are determined by the age in which the evaluation was made. Under the model, the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating time series is shown to be a good approximation to the political events that inform retrospective presidential evaluations. The political events of a voter’s teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these longterm partisan preferences. The model is shown to be powerful, explaining a substantial amount of the macro-level voting trends of the last half century, especially for white voters and non-Southern whites in particular. We use a narrative of presidential political events from the 1940s to the present day to describe the model, illustrating the formation of five main generations of presidential voters.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html?rref=upshot

 

The politics of American generations: How age affects attitudes and voting behavior

On an individual level, of course, many people’s political views evolve over the course of their lives. But academic research indicates not only that generations have distinct political identities, but that most people’s basic  outlooks and orientations are set fairly early on in life. As one famous longitudinal study of Bennington College women put it, “through late childhood and early adolescence, attitudes are relatively malleable…with the potential for dramatic change possible in late adolescence or early adulthood. But greater stability sets in at some early point, and attitudes tend to be increasingly persistent as people age.”

Edited August 1, 2023 by bolverk

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

2 hours ago, MrBig said:

You must not have any younger relatives who are Trump fanatics. Their level of enthusiasm for Trump is like nothing I’ve ever seen. They put the olds to shame with their level of devotion.

Expand on this please.  Because I have no frame of reference and if what you say is true, let's just fire up the nukes and get it over with.

[Js1 85,275]

7 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Expand on this please.  Because I have no frame of reference and if what you say is true, let's just fire up the nukes and get it over with.

I mean, if you have some weird expectation that the younger generation votes 100-0 for the Dem, you’d be very wrong and frankly quite stupid. It’s still about 65-35. 

They def seem to be more into the grievance politics / war on wokeness than the culture wars stuff against the gays.

Edited August 1, 2023 by Js1

[Sawbonz 27,538]

52 minutes ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

I recently read a book of essays by the late Barry Lopez.  In one of the essays he pointed out that while there is a Holocaust museum in DC, there is no national museum dealing with Native American genocide.  I don't think I knew 1/32nd of the amount of horrors we inflicted.  Outside of some random college courses, it really isn't taught or acknowledged. 

Well if you start teaching that you’re going to have to start throwing out a bunch of your heroes, starting with Grant and Sherman 

[Jack Straw 2,954]

7 hours ago, Red Five said:

When this is all over (when he's dead), we'll need to have a serious conversation as a country on how this happened. Like Germany post-WW2.

70+ million people in this country voted for someone who is uniquely unqualified for the job as President. Like, if you made up a list of all the qualities a President simply cannot have, he's got them all. They are his dominant traits.

 

it’s almost as if Republican voters are complete shitbags or something 

[The Original Greaser Bob 2,822]

25 minutes ago, Jack Straw said:

70+ million people in this country voted for someone who is uniquely unqualified for the job as President. Like, if you made up a list of all the qualities a President simply cannot have, he's got them all. They are his dominant traits.

The man is as white as white can get. 

And I'd agree.  The white man has had his day.

[MrBig 5,381]

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

Expand on this please.  Because I have no frame of reference and if what you say is true, let's just fire up the nukes and get it over with.

My brother is a hardcore Trump fan. He’s deep in the Q and doesn’t even know it. His kids get excited when they see Trump on TV. They take family trips to the wax museum to take pics with Trump and throw the finger at the Clintons.

Before Trump, my brother didn’t give a shit about politics and never even voted. Now he’s all about protecting the children and gets involved with shit like school board elections even though his kids attend private school. 

And his children will love anyone with a Trump name for generations to come because that’s all they know. My brother has way more kids than I do, so I worry about getting outnumbered over time. 

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

30 minutes ago, MrBig said:

My brother is a hardcore Trump fan. He’s deep in the Q and doesn’t even know it. His kids get excited when they see Trump on TV. They take family trips to the wax museum to take pics with Trump and throw the finger at the Clintons.

Before Trump, my brother didn’t give a shit about politics and never even voted. Now he’s all about protecting the children and gets involved with shit like school board elections even though his kids attend private school. 

And his children will love anyone with a Trump name for generations to come because that’s all they know. My brother has way more kids than I do, so I worry about getting outnumbered over time. 

Yeesh. Also, you may want to tell the fbi to keep an eye on him. Not joking. 

2 hours ago, Js1 said:

I mean, if you have some weird expectation that the younger generation votes 100-0 for the Dem, you’d be very wrong and frankly quite stupid. It’s still about 65-35. 

They def seem to be more into the grievance politics / war on wokeness than the culture wars stuff against the gays.

Oh I’ll take 65-35. Though I’d like to think it’s more like 80-20. Just let me believe that ok?

[C-Man 27,187]

4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Let me introduce you to our former Governor, Rick Fucking Perry and our navy and air force 

And he doesn’t limit himself to the water, and he knows how not to lead them so much

[MrBig 5,381]

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

Yeesh. Also, you may want to tell the fbi to keep an eye on him. Not joking. 

He’s been a police officer for over 15 years and was in the military for a few years before that. He’s a huge Trump fan but did not support Jan 6. He thinks Trump lost the election. But he also thinks of Trump as the ultimate savior for this country. If my brother wants to worship another man, I’d prefer it be Jesus instead of Donald Trump.

[Willfully Horn 8,002]

12 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

Serious conversations about unpleasant things in our past is not something Americans do.  For the really big things, we don't have serious conversations.  We come up with myths.  Like "slavery was contrary to America's founding principles and ideals" and "the Civil War was over states' rights."  Those can be unpacked by academics.  But in the popular imagination of America and a place and Americans as a people, those myths hold sway.

But for the lesser unpleasantries, they go to a Land of Forgetting.  Like, there was an entire anarchist terrorist campaign in the United States that killed a bunch of people between about 1890 and 1941.  But we learn nothing about that in school.  The closest we get is Sacco and Vanzetti, who were actually innocent.  But there were actual anarchists who actually killed people (including a president).

Trump is going to be consigned to the Land of Forgetting.  There will be no truth and reconciliation.  We don't do that.  It's not our bag, baby.

The atomic bombs saved (American) lives.

[YGIFS 19,449]

Allied conventional bombing raids killed more than 500,000 Japanese, most of those over just the last 18 months of the war.  A mainland invasion, both sea-borne and airborne infantry would have taken at least another 500,000 Allied lives and 3-5x that amount of Japanese lives (civilian and military) from close combat, artillery, armor, and more conventional bombing.  

We dress up a lot of ugly history in this country as stated above.  But there's a reason we don't talk about what almost happened starting in the Summer of 1945.  Because it's less uncomfortable to talk about atomic bombs than it is to discuss what we almost did instead.  It would have been the largest, deadliest military campaign in human history.  

And of yeah, the two atomic bombs also prevented Japan from adding to another conveniently glossed-over number.  They had already murdered 20,000,000 Chinese and adding to it every single day until Nagasaki.  

500,000 dead just from air raids.  Another 2mm dead from conventional warfare and civilian deaths.  All that ordnance, all that death, all that murdering of Chinese innocents, plus Hiroshima.  And surrender never occurred to them.  We buy into a lot of convenient lies, but Nagasaki isn't one of them.  The Potsdam Accord just sat there collecting dust while they refused to believe their Emperor was not a living God.  To say that the Atomic Bombs were the lesser of two evils is not accurate.  The alternative to using them wasn't even an alternative, the horrors of a mainland invasion preceded by more air raids would have set the planet back decades.  We would have likely gone into a hot war with Russia at the same time as well, costing millions of more lives.  

Admittedly, I'm biased.  My grandfather's carrier group re-supplied and set sail for Okinawa where he would be among the first NCO logicians extending the supply lines onto the Mainland where massive sea defenses awaited.  He would have drowned or burned to death, or both.  As would everyone in that carrier group and hundreds of thousands behind them. 

Back to more fun lies we tell ourselves as a nation.....the fun contradiction that we 'discovered' America and that Native Americans are 'indigenous' to this land.  Nobody spontaneously just popped up in what is today the Continental United States.  Somebody walked here a long, long time ago and century by century, a new group showed up and drove them out.  No human group just naturally, and natively, occurred in 'America.'  If your group wants to declare you were here before the rest of us, more power to you.  But nobody was here 'first.'   

[Sawbonz 27,538]

9 hours ago, MrBig said:

My brother is a hardcore Trump fan. He’s deep in the Q and doesn’t even know it. His kids get excited when they see Trump on TV. They take family trips to the wax museum to take pics with Trump and throw the finger at the Clintons.

Before Trump, my brother didn’t give a shit about politics and never even voted. Now he’s all about protecting the children and gets involved with shit like school board elections even though his kids attend private school. 

And his children will love anyone with a Trump name for generations to come because that’s all they know. My brother has way more kids than I do, so I worry about getting outnumbered over time. 

How old are his kids?

[royiv 9,252]

7 hours ago, MrBig said:

He’s been a police officer for over 15 years

Yikes. I'm not surprised since cops aren't typically know to be real thinking men these days, but still. As his hero would say, he's right out of central casting for being a Trumpanzee. 

[RomaVicta 29,902]

11 hours ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

I recently read a book of essays by the late Barry Lopez.  In one of the essays he pointed out that while there is a Holocaust museum in DC, there is no national museum dealing with Native American genocide.  I don't think I knew 1/32nd of the amount of horrors we inflicted.  Outside of some random college courses, it really isn't taught or acknowledged. 

We prefer the story where we're not Hitler's Germany.

I can't recommend An Indigenous People's History of the United States enough. A salient point is how what was done was policy including scalp-taking of men, women, and children, laying waste to farmlands, and burning villages.

The author is a scholar, and she quotes the mandates of government. As did you, I learned new things. The new things and things I'd picked up here and there over the decades are woven together into a fabric depicting the uprooting and utter destruction of indigenous nations and peoples.

Even my mildly enlightened perspective was turned on its head then bitch-slapped.

 

[Bookman 4,638]

18 hours ago, YGIFS said:

If I live to be 1000 years old, none of this will ever make any goddamn sense. 

That's because you are using reason. Try hitting yourself in the head with a hammer a few times.

[wildcat09 29,345]

4 hours ago, YGIFS said:

Allied conventional bombing raids killed more than 500,000 Japanese, most of those over just the last 18 months of the war.  A mainland invasion, both sea-borne and airborne infantry would have taken at least another 500,000 Allied lives and 3-5x that amount of Japanese lives (civilian and military) from close combat, artillery, armor, and more conventional bombing.  

We dress up a lot of ugly history in this country as stated above.  But there's a reason we don't talk about what almost happened starting in the Summer of 1945.  Because it's less uncomfortable to talk about atomic bombs than it is to discuss what we almost did instead.  It would have been the largest, deadliest military campaign in human history.  

And of yeah, the two atomic bombs also prevented Japan from adding to another conveniently glossed-over number.  They had already murdered 20,000,000 Chinese and adding to it every single day until Nagasaki.  

500,000 dead just from air raids.  Another 2mm dead from conventional warfare and civilian deaths.  All that ordnance, all that death, all that murdering of Chinese innocents, plus Hiroshima.  And surrender never occurred to them.  We buy into a lot of convenient lies, but Nagasaki isn't one of them.  The Potsdam Accord just sat there collecting dust while they refused to believe their Emperor was not a living God.  To say that the Atomic Bombs were the lesser of two evils is not accurate.  The alternative to using them wasn't even an alternative, the horrors of a mainland invasion preceded by more air raids would have set the planet back decades.  We would have likely gone into a hot war with Russia at the same time as well, costing millions of more lives.  

Admittedly, I'm biased.  My grandfather's carrier group re-supplied and set sail for Okinawa where he would be among the first NCO logicians extending the supply lines onto the Mainland where massive sea defenses awaited.  He would have drowned or burned to death, or both.  As would everyone in that carrier group and hundreds of thousands behind them. 

Back to more fun lies we tell ourselves as a nation.....the fun contradiction that we 'discovered' America and that Native Americans are 'indigenous' to this land.  Nobody spontaneously just popped up in what is today the Continental United States.  Somebody walked here a long, long time ago and century by century, a new group showed up and drove them out.  No human group just naturally, and natively, occurred in 'America.'  If your group wants to declare you were here before the rest of us, more power to you.  But nobody was here 'first.'   

That's not really true. There's a lot of historical debate that I'm not particularly well versed in over whether the emperor actually made an offer to conditionally surrender in January of 1945, and there were certainly elements of Japanese command that wanted to fight to the last man, but there were others who were absolutely looking for a diplomatic end to the war. 

I'm not particularly interested in the details of this historical argument because even the strongest "they would've surrendered" arguments rest on fairly loose evidentiary foundations, but "the Japanese people were unthinking fanatics who were totally committed to their emperor as a god and would've fought to the last child" is definitely one of those simplistic, comforting lies American people have told themselves over the decades.  It's hard to find much sympathy for the Japanese people though, given all the horrors they were more than happy to inflict on China and Korea. 

[Biff Tannen 45,665]

22 hours ago, Red Five said:

When this is all over (when he's dead), we'll need to have a serious conversation as a country on how this happened. Like Germany post-WW2.

70+ million people in this country voted for someone who is uniquely unqualified for the job as President. Like, if you made up a list of all the qualities a President simply cannot have, he's got them all. They are his dominant traits.

 

Bringing this back to the present, I think a good chunk of his voters (not the base) have come to terms with this, but they have ALSO convinced themselves that it has to be done because the Dems are EVEN WORSE.

It's insane, but I think that's what they think.  My BIL is like this, I'm pretty sure.  Successful business owner, very well off, but thinks the Dems will be the death of us all.  So Trump it is.

[Eskimohorn 5,630]

Saw poll today: Biden 43 / Trump 42

Unbelievable. We’re fucked.

[David Dennison 18,849]

34 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

Saw poll today: Biden 43 / Trump 42

Unbelievable. We’re fucked.

 

[Neonmoon 38,129]

36 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

Saw poll today: Biden 43 / Trump 42

Unbelievable. We’re fucked.

[David Dennison 18,849]

Thanks, Rupert.

[BamaATL 16,593]

2 hours ago, Eskimohorn said:

Saw poll today: Biden 43 / Trump 42

Unbelievable. We’re fucked.

So about these polls - they aren't accurate for several reasons, one of which is that people that are busy tend to ignore requests to be surveyed.  This typically lends itself to be skewed towards older and often retired people responding.  Also, you have consider methodology in how these polls are conducted.  For some polls, they do things like call land lines to get survey information, this is obviously dubious, as how many people do you know under the age of 50 that have land lines?  For ones that don't use land lines, how many people don't ignore what they would they consider to be a spam phone call?  There are other factors at play, but also consider that often times political polls are released that are deliberately skewed to produce outrage or draw attention, especially when run by a media company attempting to draw rating and produce talking points.  Fox creates bullshit polls to do exactly that, and don't think CNN is above it either. 

Pew is largely considered to be a good poll, but if you read their own methodology you will find that they concede it's far from perfect.  Even in unbiased polling there are significant margins of error, which when extrapolated over millions of voters isn't a small matter, quite frankly it's gigantic.  

https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/u-s-surveys/frequently-asked-questions/

I'm not saying polls don't have a use, but what I am saying is that a big grain of salt is necessary.  Additionally, when you see a poll, see if they back up their work and show methodology.  For all we know, that poll was conducted by surveying the "friends of the proud boys" facebook group.  

[nbmishoid 949]

Good stuff.   But the poll does suggest that it is not at all clear that Biden will be re-elected.  A depressing thought.

[hornmpa96 2,618]

I only care about specific state polls. What does a poll look like in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Michigan?

I don’t know what to make of the national polls.