2024 US Presidential Election Thread

  • Thread starter ryzno
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sturk0167
I certainly didn't, but that's exactly what most of the posters here do to me, routinely.
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I asked you questions about your beliefs and never made anything up or attacked you. The thread’s been pretty hectic, so it was probably easy to miss. I’ll quote myself below for you.

Hayden
I respect that you are a person of belief, so I've got a handful of yes/no questions for you.

1 - Do you believe that Donald Trump is a Christian?
- (IF YES) Do you think he will get in to heaven?
- (IF NO) Do you think it's ok for him to endorse and charge for a copy of the bible?

2 - Do you believe that the 2020 Election was rigged/stolen away from Trump?
- (IF YES) Who did it, why and how?
- (IF NO) Why do you think he has repeatedly stated this to be the case?

3 - Do you believe that Donald Trump's words/actions contributed to the Capitol Riot?
- (IF YES) If a group of democratic supporters did it, would they be "Patriots" or "Criminals"?
- (IF NO) Why has it never happened during past elections?

4 - Do you believe that Donald Trump may be a Prophet or Demi-God?
- (IF YES) Is he Jesus, opening the 7 Seals to mark the beginning of the apocalypse?
- (IF NO) Are the supporters who worship Trump, committing a Sin against the 10 commandments?


Jesus once said "You cannot serve both God and money", so one would expect a believer to talk of Him often.
When I google "Trump God Quotes" I get 13 Million results. "Trump Money Quotes" returns nearly 4 times this amount.

5 - Is Google censored to prevent me seeing Trump talk about god?
- (IF YES) What benefit does it pay (and to who) to censor this?
- (IF NO) Why would a religious person discuss (serve) money, so much more than God?

You should be able to answer these in just a couple of minutes and I'm sure many would be interested in your responses. :)
Click to expand...

I’ll add another one too.

6 - Do you believe Trump will win the next election?
- (IF YES) How would you react if Biden claimed election fraud?
- (IF NO) Do you think Trump will concede defeat?
 
Hayden
I asked you questions about your beliefs and never made anything up or attacked you. The thread’s been pretty hectic, so it was probably easy to miss. I’ll quote myself below for you.



I’ll add another one too.

6 - Do you believe Trump will win the next election?
- (IF YES) How would you react if Biden claimed election fraud?
- (IF NO) Do you think Trump will concede defeat?
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I saw what you wrote, and chose not to respond, because I questioned your motives.
 
sturk0167
I saw what you wrote, and chose not to respond, because I questioned your motives.
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I’ve had trouble figuring out your perspective and I thought getting a few key details fleshed out would aid my understanding of what you feel and why.

My motive was to understand your beliefs so I could rationalise your point of view and discuss the points in good faith.
 
sturk0167
Why would I try to explain something that I know is a lie?
cha.house.gov

Chairman Loudermilk Publishes Never-Before Released Anthony Ornato Transcribed Interview

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration
cha.house.gov cha.house.gov
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Hmm...
TexRex
Loudermilk: "I didn't lead a Capitol tour on January 5th and anyone who says I did is a liar!"

Also Loudermilk: "No see the guy in the security camera footage of the Capitol tour I gave on January 5th was taking pictures of the trains and a sconce."

I don't particularly care for Omar or any of the firebrand "Squad," but she makes a really good point here.



Absolute ****ing garbage.
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Mind you this is the same rat bitch (I mean what are the odds there would be two called "Loudermilk"?) what likened its bronzer daddy to Jesus. Trumpers are so eager to do this and it's pathetic.
 
TexRex
Loudermilk
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I assume they look like this:
1711674304088.png
 
sturk0167
That's not how most of the people here operate, so of course my guard would be up.
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I enjoy openly discussing topics with people of a different background and belief system. I find it’s a great way to learn and empathetically understand why people believe what they do.

It’s a personal-growth tool and I find it to be a valuable one. The best discussions are had when guards are dropped and humans communicate in good faith.
 
sturk0167
I certainly didn't
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Then quote me saying what you ascribe to me here before you tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about for a thing I never said:
sturk0167
And will you believe that Biden has the favor of the the electorate?
He certainly does not.
I live here, and can reassure you that people whose everyday lives have been ruined by the left are absolutely not supporting Biden.
I don't understand your motivation in supporting the American leftists.
I really don't think you know what you're talking about.
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It's just constant, bad faith, dishonest posting from you, and then the victim card comes out when you're challenged on anything.

Nobody is getting any value from your persistent lack of engagement here.
 
Seems that Trump has spent ~$100 MILLION on lawyers who are working on pretending that he didn't lose to Biden.

Of course the money was sourced from ... wait for it ... MAGA DONATIONS!

I'm not sure if my joy at seeing the Gullibles™ being fleeced outweighs the outrage of seeing Trump get away with more grifting.

Surely, the money diverted from PAC donations should be seen as "income"by the IRS?
 
sturk0167
Why would I try to explain something that I know is a lie?
cha.house.gov

Chairman Loudermilk Publishes Never-Before Released Anthony Ornato Transcribed Interview

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration
cha.house.gov cha.house.gov
Click to expand...

I wonder how you came to the conclusion that this person is telling the truth and all those other people, and there are a lot of them, are lying. They even testify that Ivanka and his other advisors were frustrated with his refusal to try to stop the riot. But none of this should shake your "faith". When one person contradicts them, you should probably immediately side with the person saying what you like right? Ivanka herself testified that Trump knew the election wasn't stolen, but you keep on believing.

Trump told them to go. And he knew, and they knew, what he wanted to them to do to encourage pence to change his mind. But you keep your faith. You keep believing that Donald 'grab-'em-and-hangs-out-with-Epstein Trump is not a rapist, and you keep believing in tea time with mike pence. That's probably why pence refuses to support him, because he knows Trump had his back all along. Who cares about evidence when you have blind belief?
 
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GBO Possum
Seems that Trump has spent ~$100 MILLION on lawyers who are working on pretending that he didn't lose to Biden.

Of course the money was sourced from ... wait for it ... MAGA DONATIONS!

I'm not sure if my joy at seeing the Gullibles™ being fleeced outweighs the outrage of seeing Trump get away with more grifting.

Surely, the money diverted from PAC donations should be seen as "income"by the IRS?
Click to expand...
The problem is it's just more diverting money from people who probably aren't that well off to people who absolutely are. Even if both groups of people are assholes, it's not doing anything other than making things worse.
 
TexRex
Mind you this is the same rat bitch (I mean what are the odds there would be two called "Loudermilk"?) what likened its bronzer daddy to Jesus. Trumpers are so eager to do this and it's pathetic.
Click to expand...
Checking out the replies to his 10:1 ratioed tweet, I don't think I've seen anyone unite Christians and non-Christians alike against themselves so effectively. Talk about aging like (louder)milk.

 
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Imari
The problem is it's just more diverting money from people who probably aren't that well off to people who absolutely are. Even if both groups of people are assholes, it's not doing anything other than making things worse.
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Yes but giving all of your money to Donald Trump owns the libs.
 
Danoff
You've done the opposite of what you were just complaining about - defining it so broadly that you can't help but see it everywhere. If I donate money to the poor am I borrowing an idea from communism? If the government taxes me and gives the money to the poor is it borrowing an idea from communism? Both of those concepts pre-date communism.

Communism as a word actually has a meaning, and you need to maintain some semblance of that meaning to have a reasonable discussion.



This is actually naive. Many countries throughout history have just been "whatever that guy says goes". Your "confluence of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of political ideas" sounds like a nation that has at least some protections for freedom of speech and representation. The fact that you think this is how countries are constructed strikes me as privilege, stemming from living in a culture that actually fosters and enables that kind of political discourse and input. Countries can be made of those things, but they don't have to be, and most haven't been.



This misunderstands capitalism fundamentally. But don't take that personally, this misunderstanding is ubiquitous. Capitalism is just a description of economic activity with some degree of freedom. It's what people do in the slack in the system. You say it's fundamental to the functioning of the government, but it's just what happens. It wasn't going to be any other way. And it's not going to fail, it can't fail, it's just what happens. If "capitalism" fails, it's actually the government structure around that slack that failed. Capitalism just occurs - even within communism. "Capitalism failed" is like saying "chemistry failed" when your experiment doesn't turn out. It can't fail, it's just what happens. The setup was where the failure was.

So your perspective on these "third world" countries you were referring to is entirely backward. They're examples of various government structures (such as a dictatorship or anarchy) failing capitalism. Not the other way around. Capitalism just occurs in whatever space is left for free exchange.

Edit:

When people say "capitalism failed" referring to the US, what they're actually saying is that the US's particular blend of socialism is failing in some kind of specific way.
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To simply define capitalism as something that can never fail is one of the biggest reaches I've ever seen.

I'll just point out that in saying that capitalism cannot be why a country fails you've also - unintentionally - made it impossible for capitalism to be the reason a country succeeds too. You can't have it both ways. If there are no capitalist failures...but there are capitalist success stories everywhere you look...then you might want to think a bit more clearly about your reasoning. I think you'll admit that that can't be right.

"You've done the opposite of what you were just complaining about - defining it so broadly that you can't help but see it everywhere. If I donate money to the poor am I borrowing an idea from communism? If the government taxes me and gives the money to the poor is it borrowing an idea from communism? Both of those concepts pre-date communism."

All concepts are partially or wholly borrowed from somewhere before. Nothing just springs into existence as a whole; that's not the way creation works. Ideas are iterated and combined and evolved. That's how things progress creatively. You're still thinking about these political and economic concepts as though they're things that either exist totally or not at all. But they're not; they're systems comprised of a huge number of different concepts; and other political and economic systems share a lot of those different concepts.

Re. definitions - definitions necessarily compress a huge number of different concepts down into a single row of letters. That's what a word is: a conceptual compression. 'Communism' compresses a whole bunch of related concepts - thousands, maybe tens of thousands of concepts, depending on how closely you look - into nine letters. That makes it possible to carry all those thousands of concepts(eg. taxation, redistribution, Bolshevism, Russia, the colour red, Marx's works, a sickle and hammer, etc.) around in our head, and talk intelligiibly about all those different concepts all at once to people, using just one nine letter package. But that doesn't make those thousands of implicit concepts that have been compressed by the word 'communism' go away. They're still there anytime you think about the word a little closer. And they can be there in a country to varying extents. That's all I'm saying, and it's not controversial.

To me, the problem is you're thinking about these political and economic defintions as though they have no constituent parts, and that they somehow just mean something very specific and singular that's irreducible. That political and economic systems don't allow for anything like a spectrum. You want to fit these ideas into their procrustean bed, but they don't fit.
It's obviously not the way any country on earth works; you know this deep down because we could pick any country you want at random, you could use one of your fixed definitions to describe it(it doesn't have to be 'communist' or 'capitalist', all definitions are vulnerable to this), and I could spend thirty seconds on google coming up with endless examples from that country that just don't fit the label you've given it. In reality that country is a partial version of whichever definition you've chosen - that's what ALL countries are. No country on earth wholly fits a particular political or economic label. That doesn't make definitions useless - it just means they're a shorthand for a more complicated truth.

UKMikey
If this is directed at me then I live in a partially socialist country. From what I understand, socialism isn't communism until the state hasn't eliminated free movement of the economy and established an authoritarian dictatorship of the proletariat. This article from Britannica sees communism as an end goal rather than a transitional stage.
www.britannica.com

Which countries are communist?

Which countries are communist? At one time about one-third of the world's population lived under communist governments, most notably in the republics
www.britannica.com www.britannica.com

The rest of your post seems to me to go on to argue that I said there was no such thing as a mixed economy ("no good wigs"). This is pretty much the opposite of what I said. The whole point of my previous post was to say that mixed economies are partly socialist, not partly communist for the reasons given above.

Everything else seems to me to read as a sematics argument on whether socialism and communism are terms which can be used interchangeably. As far as I know from reading this thread, that isn't the case hence my previous quote from @Danoff.
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I think you're just defining communism as something that can't be reduced to any internal constituent concepts. If the definition of Communism has internal parts(eg. redistribution, taxation, etc.) then those parts can be present in other countries. Saying that it's not communism unless a certain thing, like "authoritarian dictatorship of the proletariat", is true invites counterexamples. Even the defining features you've chosen(which I admit are quite good as an explanatory breakdown of why Communism doesn't work; and it really doesn't seem to work, let's make that clear) are absent or partially absent in certain countries that we would think of as archetypally 'Communist'. And other features of Communism(IDK why I'm capitalising it; I think I'm turning into Trump) ARE present in countries that we would think of as archetypally capitalist.

But still, if you admit that elements of socialism are present in pretty much every western country on earth then I think we're both saying the same thing, so the details aren't so important. I have a different way of thinking about definitions, as more like a system of sub-ideas, that are themselves comprised of sub-ideas, and on and on. Definitions are shorthand for a much more complicated truth; that's why they're so useful. So I don't see that socialism and communism are massively conceptually different; they're seen as such because of the ways that America weaponised the word communism, and now thanks to that, communism comes loaded with hugely horrible features that are considered defining; like the ones you mentioned about totalitarian governments and lack of economic freedom. But the actual conceptual structure of the two ideas isn't hugely different. The US did a good job of monomanically attaching 'communism' to every ****-up and atrocity on the international left, so the word has attained historical connotations; but as a philosophy it's not that much of a departure from socialism, and it's just as internationally ubiquitous in terms of its basic ideas as socialism.

This is a car website right?
 
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The Sprawl
To simply define capitalism as something that can never fail is one of the biggest reaches I've ever seen.

I'll just point out that in saying that capitalism cannot be why a country fails you've also - unintentionally - made it impossible for capitalism to be the reason a country succeeds too. You can't have it both ways. If there are no capitalist failures...but there are capitalist success stories everywhere you look...then you might want to think a bit more clearly about your reasoning. I think you'll admit that that can't be right.
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No that was fully intentional. Yes, capitalism is not the reason anything succeeds. I'm glad you understood what I meant. It's not an economic "system", and it's not a government and it's not the reason for success or failure. This isn't a "reach" because I'm not looking to achieve any particular end other than to have an understanding of terms that fit with each other and have some explanatory power without being contradictory. That's why we end up at this understanding of the word "capitalism".

If this is uncomfortable to you, I'm ok with using the term capitalism to mean a version of socialism that's on the light end of the spectrum of economic control. That's how a lot of people use it, but it's not, in my view, a very helpful or illustrative use of the word, and it leads to confusion.
The Sprawl
All concepts are partially or wholly borrowed from somewhere before.
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That was my point to you.
The Sprawl
Re. definitions - definitions necessarily compress a huge number of different concepts down into a single row of letters. That's what a word is: a conceptual compression. 'Communism' compresses a whole bunch of related concepts - thousands, maybe tens of thousands of concepts, depending on how closely you look - into nine letters. That makes it possible to carry all those thousands of concepts(eg. taxation, redistribution, Bolshevism, Russia, the colour red, Marx's works, a sickle and hammer, etc.) around in our head, and talk intelligiibly about all those different concepts all at once to people, using just one nine letter package. But that doesn't make those thousands of implicit concepts that have been compressed by the word 'communism' go away. They're still there anytime you think about the word a little closer. And they can be there in a country to varying extents. That's all I'm saying, and it's not controversial.
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You've missed the ordering in this. Communism is an economic system based on a complete lack of personal property. If there's any irreducible component of it, that's it. Saying that it "carries" concepts like "redistribution" is not technically wrong, but it would be wrong to then say that taxation or redistribution is borrowed from, or a portion of, communism. Taxation and redistribution predate communism by a long way. It's not suddenly a little communist to tax and redistribute AFTER communism became a thing when it WASN'T communist when those things were done BEFORE communism became a thing.

You're accidentally doing what you complain about here:

The Sprawl
The US did a good job of monomanically attaching 'communism' to every ****-up and atrocity on the international left, so the word has attained historical connotations;
Click to expand...
By saying that taxation is communist, when it's NOT communist, and predates communism by a long way, and is not in any way a small amount of communism, you make yourself sound like a US right winger who is attaching communism to everything they don't like in order to make it sound bad. Taxation doesn't just predate communism, it's incompatible with communism, because taxation relies on personal property ownership.

Putting a sickle on something is not communist, even though it is an idea that can be associated with some specific instances of communism. Communism is an economic concept which corresponds to state (actually collective is better here) ownership of all property.

TL;DR Taxation is CLEARLY not communist.


=======================================
Total aside here, video games often provide a great example of capitalism. Games where you can trade with other players for profit are essentially always built with protections that prevent players from harming or threatening each other into a stolen or coerced exchange of goods. But there is no government or overriding goal beyond this, just a basic rule that says you can't hurt each other, now feel free to trade. And capitalism absolutely flourishes within this framework. Players trade with each other, and each player then becomes a little better off and the rising tide lifts all boats. Ultimately amazingly useful tools which were only available to the wealthiest players become affordable to poorer players, and a higher level of play is achievable by all. It's actually quite beautiful, in a very simplistic kind of way. It's too bad that government can't be as effective at stopping people from harming or coercing each other in the real world - because when it is done very effectively, the capitalist economic activity that forms within that framework is very powerful and beneficial.

...but there is no opportunity for a player to get control of the controls.
 
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