You’re wrong. The USA is going to have an economic boom like it’s never seen before. The South in particular will see explosive growth.
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If by a boom, you mean GO boom, and by go boom, you mean go bust, then yes.
And this time they won’t have crazy Germans to piggyback getting the economy out of the gutter with.
What I said is true. Hand over my heart and swear on your mothers swollen, raw clit.
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My mother is dead.
Has been, for over a decade.
Kind of like America.
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It is. It’s the one we’ve been using for hundreds of years. And most importantly, it’s the one that is accepted legally. The law is our societal standard and maybe what is considered our legal standard will change, but as of 2018, in the United States, it is not against the law to call someone names. It IS however against the law to physically assault someone, because violence in all forms is against the law excluding sanctioned fights like boxing, and that is the legally accepted definition of the term, which is what it’s been since we drafted legal documents. Have a good night.
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You are wrong.
And you have a good night, too.
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It is also, however, illegal to use words to induce violence, or to induce any other crime really. You can, for example, tell some rando to kill themselves as an insult, but you are NOT allowed to try to convince someone that killing themselves is a thing that they actually should do.
Similarly, imagine someone going around your neighborhood telling families that “lot’s of people are saying that YOU are a pedophile”. It is not at all unlikely that some protective parent is eventually apt to assault you for innocently getting near their kid on the sidewalk. Now imagine that the President gets on Twitter and amplifies that message with “Lot’s of people are saying that TDM…” Those words aren’t LITERALLY the violence that would be about to befall you, but what do you think would ultimately be to blame for the shit-storm you life would turn in to?
Plus, there’s always the classic example of yelling FIRE in a crowded theater. Freedom of speech isn’t a guarantee that everything that could be said is going to be legal.
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which is how they end up with the tea party. which is how they end up with trumpers claiming to be conservative. which is how they end up with the so-called evangelicals turning out to be not so christian. which is how they end up embracing fringe groups.
i don’t think anyone will have to wait long to find out what action if any is taken. the SS and Medicare trustees published a 2018 report informing the public that if no policy changes are made. the SS savings account will run out in 2034. the trust funds for Medicare will run out in 2026, but to answer your question…
i think neither will cease to operate because of incoming payroll taxes and other revenue and i agree that it’s going to be worse. in the case of SS, they estimate benefits will probably have be cut to about 75% to sustain payouts until 2092. we started dipping into the savings account this year in order to pay full SS benefits. the trend starts off small and is expected to accelerate around 2020 and beyond. the reason is simple, baby boomers are retiring and current retirees are living longer and collecting more benefits.
in any case, some of their other findings were interesting: (1) trump’s tax cut isn’t helping in the matter. in fact, the board said as a whole. the cut has a “significant net negative effect” over the short term and a “negligible net positive effect” over the long term. (2) immigration even illegal immigration could help increase the solvency of SS. the reason is simple, we went from from one retiree for every 5 workers to one retiree for every 3 workers and because of declining birth rates that number is shrinking.
there’s a lot of talk about the hotness of job market and job creation. however, those jobs have to be filled in order to take advantage of the potential economic growth. otherwise, you’re just leaving money on the table. so, you need more workers in order to increase productivity (productivity growth isn’t all that hot right now) but if employers can’t find them. it becomes a drag on the economy in the long run.
anyway, it’s too bad trump can’t read anything longer than one third of a tweet before his brain gets exhausted and he needs to go watch fox news for 3 or 4 hours to recover from the ordeal. he’ll never know his own people just shitted on his policy decisions. trump could have used the info to further heighten his cult’s fear of demographic change and tell his dry dick, creepy ass cult members to stop being mad because they were not chosen, develop some game, increase the birth rate and stop doing dumb shit like shooting up yoga classes.
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one would think that as much as some of these guys lie around here. they would actually develop some skill at creating undetectable lies and speaking of horrible bullshitters. trump is up to 6,420 false or misleading claims over 649 days and in the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections. trump made 1,419 false or misleading claims or an average of 30 a day. 30 lies a day? he’s like the golden state warriors of lies, but without the efficiency. he just keeps chucking up air balls.
but what if that person is impervious to certain facts? for example, if you show a flat earther NASA photos and video of the earth from space. do you think he’s likely to react rationally and say,“oh, i’ve been wrong all along” or is he to likely to say “you can’t trust anything from NASA. it’s being run by our reptilian overlords.”. Or, what about this persistent belief among certain people that obama is a muslim or/and from another country despite being debunked thoroughly.
i’m not saying your wrong, but motivated reasoning (or motivated ignorance) is an actual thing. in fact, there are a number of reasons behind why a number of people are susceptible to “alternative facts”, extremists and fringe groups. facts or civility aren’t going to necessarily make an impression on these people.
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obama with the shyts.
i’ve been asking the same thing myself. in any case, i would like to see more perpetually aggrieved winners outside of cult 45. it would been hilarious to watch the red sox win a world series and reject the championship trophy, parades and rings in a fit of pique and start airing their grievances about any and everything in the post game interviews.
the gop was supposed to use their “middle class” tax cut as a midterm platform, but they pivoted away to health care. they pivoted away from health care after getting sauced up on preexisting conditions. apparently, they finally settled on driving their angry rabble to new heights of hysteria over a caravan. how bold.
seriously? wow. srk keeps those internet beefs alive.
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I see what you’re saying. It’s an interesting point, and there are tons of examples of people doing what you’re saying, but those examples aren’t able to be prosecuted because the words and the acts are two different things. The words themselves would fall into the libel category while any violence you encountered as a result of them is a different kettle of fish because they aren’t comparable things. If they were, we’d be treating beating someone near to death and misgendering someone as the same thing. They’re not, they shouldn’t be considered such, and they are two completely different ballparks.
But I do agree that while free speech itself should be guaranteed, a lack of consequences that come as a result of your speech shouldn’t necessarily be.
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People make fun of the term “fake news” but let’s be honest, most folks will willingly ignore facts that don’t confirm to their worldview and doing so is ultimately rewarded by other people who feel the same way. Trying to have a rational reasoned debate with your average reader of The Donald or r/news is like punching yourself in the dick, it’s only gonna hurt you and it’s a waste of time. Fringe extremism has been rewarded since probably before the Tea Party but they were the first ones I remember getting way too much press for being absolute fucking yahoos.
One of these days, rational Americans will awaken to the fact that THEY are The Fringe.
I want to believe most people are generally rational even if they have different opinions. The problem is that we reward the bad behavior of extremism with more airtime so there’s incentive for attention seekers to go that route. But I don’t believe that’s most people.
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I want to believe that too.
But I’ve never been one to ignore an overwhelming abundance of evidence to the contrary.
no, that wasn’t always the case. the conservative party have always had members from the far right or radical right, but there was a time when they were kept at arms length away from the mainstream party. the john birch society run by robert welch existed well before the tea party and before trump. in fact, their rhetoric and ideals would fit in quite well in the trump administration. they were just as bat shit crazy as anything that came out of trump’s mouth.
however, back in the day, their ideas were considered so extreme that people like barry goldwater and william f. buckley considered them a conspiracist, fascist, fringe group who were shitting up conservatism and something needed to be done needed before they got too big and too popular to control. long story short, JBS went into decline in part due to buckley and in part due to the hubris of welch. buckley and nixon then went on to define conservatism and the identity of the republican party which did everything it could to keep these fringe elements from getting even remotely close to the centers of power.
obviously, the establishment gop has completely broken down because there’s no one around to keep those elements in check. anyway, it’s too bad buckley died. i wonder what he would have wrote about trump. oh wait, he did write something about trump back he was was seeking the presidential nomination from the reform party back in 2000.
apparently, he didn’t think much of him because knew what trump was on. still, i think it would have been funny to see buckley at one of these trump rallies and hear his running commentary in his distinctive accent.
my lord! where is that vile stench emanating? wait. do these people bathe? (pulls out a perfumed silk hermes handkerchief and covers his nose)
this is preposterous! the people at this event behave like the resulting spawn from a bacchanalian orgy of genetic defects. do you mean to tell me these people are claiming to be conservatives?
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Part of modern conservative political ideology is hostility to news from the “out” group. As a non-conservative I’ve listened to conservative talk radio basically since 9/11, most days of the week. The current direction and behavior of that part of the country is utterly predictable and consistent (this includes alt-right & alt-light people who don’t realize how much they sound like Ann Coulter but are repeating the same talking points). I can relate to people who were upset by the 2016 election results, I can’t relate to people feeling surprised.
The conservative movement is basically fronted by the Hot Take Corps (Trump is essentially president because he was a Fox News talking head who had hot takes that people liked), all of whom will tell you that they are the victims of liberal something-or-other. The rest of American conservativism is in the passenger seat, and have either resigned themselves to go along for the ride, or have smugly convinced that they’ll grab the wheel mid-traffic if they need to, but that nothing bad will happen if they do. Given that the media wing has taken over, it’s not a surprise that their approach- just say something outlandish, to prove you are down for the team no matter what- has become governmental policy.
It is a very real goal to promote the conservative bubble, and make people dependent upon it. The “fake news” thing is just the mutation of the talking points about the “liberal mainstream media” that people had been getting for decades before. There was a lot of talk about “liberal idea bubbles” after the election, I assure you there was no such conversation on the political right to that extent, because there is a very weak mechanism for self-criticism.
It so happens, the thing that unifies the right is hatred of liberals. So when Trump does something insane, there are a lot of people who take in a lot of news (or news-entertainment, if you will) who will just not hear about it, because Hannity and Carlson spent big segments of their shows scaring them about antifa or Seth Rich or fucking whatever. But it’s not just them, it’s people who are on the fence about Trump and even some anti-Trump Republicans, who run the risk of alienating their “team” by actually criticizing Republicans, who will prefer to repeat some bullshit “campus crybullies” story as opposed to talking about Trump being garbage. Not only will conservative political disasters be “spun”, they just may not get reported at all by the loudest voices on the right.
Incidentally, the younger version of this is the counterfeit stoicism of Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson etc (I’m less familiar with Peterson’s act, but he seems like trash - YMMV). Step one: everyone who disagrees with you is hysterical and just led by their emotions. Step two: you aren’t those people. Step three: therefore, you’re just telling it how it is. And all of this stuff I’m telling you [which you already believed] is just common sense. It is a fancy ad-hominem device for dismissing opinions and types of people. (Harris is not overtly political in the way that some others are, but because he leans so much on the idea of being rational, I take particular umbrage at the fairy tales he seems to believe about his own objectivity.) I went down a YouTube hole and saw a thousand thumbnails which read something like “LIBERAL SNOWFLAKE TRIGGERED BY…” “XYZ DESTROYS FEMINIST COLLEGE STUDENT” etc. This is the same kind of puffery, an exercise in self-flattery. Different generations of the same family.
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PS. William F. Buckley had some garbage ideas (see: segregation, Apartheid etc), some of which he certainly took to his grave. But that’s to be expected. Credit where credit is due, but…
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So I guess last night Trump did a photo op with a known KKK leader and Trumps wants to make it easier for Europeans to gain citizenship.
The GOP also said if they win the house they will reduce the age to get a firearm from 18 to 16 in some states.
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Most 16 year olds can get a firearm anyway, what does it matter.
Shit, even 11 year olds can get access to one.
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