Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Ternaugh]

4 hours ago, archer said:

 

What he obviously said was "No gnu taxes".

 

Easily my least favorite president of all time.

 

"No newt axes". 

[TheDarkness]

The Arms for Newts scandal really destroyed his presidency.

[CrosshairCollie]

On 8/2/2019 at 10:31 AM, Starlord said:

Trump promises cure for AIDS and Pediatric cancer coming soon

Let us not forget, this was the idiot who didn't know the difference between HIV and HPV.

[DShomshak]

On ‎8‎/‎2‎/‎2019 at 3:07 PM, Hermit said:

 

Honestly? With so many Americans afraid to go to doctors for fear of being bankrupt for the rest of their lives, with corporations increasingly calling the shots on what form our laws take and damn the rights of real humans if it means profits, and with a planet ecosytem possibly irreversibly harmed for future generations already?

 

I guess a possible piecrust promise made with good intentions doesn't shake me much

 

Piecrust, as in light and flaky?

 

Yes, honestly. The problems you list are real and matter, but they do not make irrelevant the President's role as Commander-in-Chief. I would prefer a candidate who seems to think seriously about that role. At that moment, Warren seemed deeply unserious.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Hermit]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

 

Piecrust, as in light and flaky?

 

Yes, honestly. The problems you list are real and matter, but they do not make irrelevant the President's role as Commander-in-Chief. I would prefer a candidate who seems to think seriously about that role. At that moment, Warren seemed deeply unserious.

 

Dean Shomshak

Easily made, easily broken, and perhaps it is cynicism on my part that I consider that par for the course.

 

But to clarify, "honestly" was not meant as 'are you for real?' and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It was meant as more of "for myself, to be honest..."

 

I respect your rationale and concerns even if I do not share them as fully.

[ScottishFox]

On 8/2/2019 at 2:13 PM, megaplayboy said:

Generally speaking, so does whoever fires first.

 

Historically speaking, so far, firing the first shot results in a 100% win rate.

 

Not that I haven't enjoyed the almost 75 years of countries not nuking each other.

[megaplayboy]

7 minutes ago, ScottishFox said:

 

Historically speaking, so far, firing the first shot results in a 100% win rate.

 

Not that I haven't enjoyed the almost 75 years of countries not nuking each other.

We have a robust early warning system that warns us of missile launches and bombers en route.  We have a robust "triad of deterrence" consisting of land based missiles in hardened silos, strategic bombers and hard to detect ballistic missile submarines operating in the oceans.  Mutually Assured Destruction was a highly effective deterrent system.  "No First Use" <> "No use".  It just means no pre-emptive nuclear attacks.  

[CrosshairCollie]

23 minutes ago, ScottishFox said:

 

Historically speaking, so far, firing the first shot results in a 100% win rate.

 

This would be the exception, as literally nobody can win a nuclear war.  Someone launches a nuke, everybody launches every nuke, world ends not with a whimper but lots of mushroom-cloud shaped bangs.

Though, to be fair, my personal viewpoint is that nobody really 'wins' any war ... one side just loses more than the other.

[wcw43921]

Exactly.  The only way to win is not to play.  Even I got that off of Wargames--and I didn't even like it all that much.

 

(Don't get me wrong--I did like it--I just wouldn't go out of my way to see it.)

[Hermit]

Pax Atomica was certainly an... interesting time period to grow up in.

 

 

[ScottishFox]

36 minutes ago, Hermit said:

Pax Atomica was certainly an... interesting time period to grow up in.

 

 

I fondly and horrifically recall the completely ineffective government safety protocols we were mandated through as a child.

 

"When the nuclear bombs go off assume a fetal position beneath your desk and don't look out the windows."

 

Man, that it surely going to help me survive a liquefying blast impact or the surface of the sun like temperatures.  Also, we were like 6-8 years old during this stupidity.

 

How to traumatize children - Make sure they know the Russians are going to nuke them into molten glass pits on the regular.

[BoloOfEarth]

26 minutes ago, Hermit said:

Pax Atomica was certainly an... interesting time period to grow up in.

 

Indirectly, growing up in that time period pretty much guaranteed that my descendants will think I was a complete moron.

 

Y'see, growing up with MAD and the threat of nuclear annihilation, I was generally happy with events of the late 1980s and 1990s - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and so on.  So when I put together a time capsule in 1999 (to be opened by my great+ grandkids in 2101), I mentioned in the journal I put inside about how happy I was that things seemed to be improving in the world, that hopefully mankind was getting its s*** together, and so on.

 

Of course, this was before 9/11 and the War on Terror, and then of course the Reign of Trumplestiltskin.  I'm pretty sure my great+ grandkids will read what I wrote and say, "How did he not see the Second American Civil War coming?!  Or the Global Climate Apocalypse?!  Gee, great-great-grandpa was either an idiot or pretty willfully ignorant!"  (That's assuming they'll be alive to even read what I wrote.)

[Hermit]

2 minutes ago, ScottishFox said:

I fondly and horrifically recall the completely ineffective government safety protocols we were mandated through as a child.

 

"When the nuclear bombs go off assume a fetal position beneath your desk and don't look out the windows."

 

Man, that it surely going to help me survive a liquefying blast impact or the surface of the sun like temperatures.  Also, we were like 6-8 years old during this stupidity.

 

How to traumatize children - Make sure they know the Russians are going to nuke them into molten glass pits on the regular.

 

I remember stories in the mid to late eighties about a high school that had requested suicide pills since no one was going to survive a nuke blast and want to live anyway.

 Not sure how legit that is, but I do recall it going around.

 

 I got kind of jaded about it myself, and noticed that anti nuke protesters were quick to protest American or nato bases, but seemed a bit more shy about trying that with Soviet ones. Gee, I wonder why?

 

Funny story, in the Netherlands, one military base had protesters camp out in a farmer's land (the farmer wasn't' happy about it) and try block incoming traffic, make a fuss, and so on... the MPs were, to their credit, the souls of tolerance regarding this, but eventually the protesters started getting bolder, ruder, and so on. Some of these guys wanted arrested to make a show of it I suppose?

The base, discovering the farmer wasn't happy about this either, paid for the farmer's fertilizer and asked only that he spray it liberally on his land in good health ASAP.

The protesters were dedicated, but not THAT dedicated and broke up fast to avoid being up to their necks in crapola.

 

 

Okay, maybe it's just me who found that funny. I was a bitter little snot as a teenager

 

 

1 minute ago, BoloOfEarth said:

 

Indirectly, growing up in that time period pretty much guaranteed that my descendants will think I was a complete moron.

 

Y'see, growing up with MAD and the threat of nuclear annihilation, I was generally happy with events of the late 1980s and 1990s - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and so on.  So when I put together a time capsule in 1999 (to be opened by my great+ grandkids in 2101), I mentioned in the journal I put inside about how happy I was that things seemed to be improving in the world, that hopefully mankind was getting its s*** together, and so on.

 

Of course, this was before 9/11 and the War on Terror, and then of course the Reign of Trumplestiltskin.  I'm pretty sure my great+ grandkids will read what I wrote and say, "How did he not see the Second American Civil War coming?!  Or the Global Climate Apocalypse?!  Gee, great-great-grandpa was either an idiot or pretty willfully ignorant!"  (That's assuming they'll be alive to even read what I wrote.)

 

We are, as a people, rather ruthless to our ancestors for missing the 'obvious' at times. I don't doubt they'll lament the stupidity of us and our lifestyles and views.

 

Or at the very least "Can you believe they didn't know how to work the three sea shells back then?"

 

And the Wall coming down? It was an amazing moment.

 

I was rather tickled that if you took all the 'Chunks of the Berlin Wall' for Sale in the following month you could recreate the great wall of CHINA let alone the Berlin wall.

Truly, a triumph of Capitalism over communism there  in more ways than we might have expected!

 

 

[ScottishFox]

13 minutes ago, Hermit said:

We are, as a people, rather ruthless to our ancestors for missing the 'obvious' at times. I don't doubt they'll lament the stupidity of us and our lifestyles and views.

 

This is why I'm not a fan of the current revisionism going on.  Yes, our ancestors were horribly flawed.  So are we.

 

You can't hold the peoples of hundreds of years ago to modern standards.  Hell, you probably can't hold your own grandparents to modern standards without deciding they are horrible -ists and -ics.

 

Historical heroes were better in some aspects than their peers, but they were still products of those times and places.  Applying modern standards makes villains of them all.

[Hermit]

3 minutes ago, ScottishFox said:

 

This is why I'm not a fan of the current revisionism going on.  Yes, our ancestors were horribly flawed.  So are we.

 

You can't hold the peoples of hundreds of years ago to modern standards.  Hell, you probably can't hold your own grandparents to modern standards without deciding they are horrible -ists and -ics.

 

Historical heroes were better in some aspects than their peers, but they were still products of those times and places.  Applying modern standards makes villains of them all.

 

I have actually met someone who believes the Declaration of Independence should be no longer taught at schools because Thomas Jefferson wrote it.

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

When I was a teen in Montreal in 1976 (yes, I'm that old) I lived near a military armory, which was also next to a high school with a large athletic field. There was a lot of security for the 1976 Summer Olympics, the first after the terrorist attacks at Munich in '72. Security helicopters used that school field as a landing area. Early one Sunday morning I awoke to a sound like rushing air overhead, getting louder. My first thought was, "The missiles are coming down." (I know, you can't actually hear a falling missile before it hits. I'd just woken up, cut me some slack.) I remember thinking that I hoped I was near ground zero so I'd die quickly rather than from burns and radiation. But after a few seconds the sound resolved into the familiar chopping of rotor blades, and I realized what it was.

 

The under-thirty people can't comprehend what it's like to grow up living with the fear that the world as you know it could end at any moment. I worry that a new generation may learn to comprehend that again.

[Hermit]

20 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

When I was a teen in Montreal in 1976 (yes, I'm that old) I lived near a military armory, which was also next to a high school with a large athletic field. There was a lot of security for the 1976 Summer Olympics, the first after the terrorist attacks at Munich in '72. Security helicopters used that school field as a landing area. Early one Sunday morning I awoke to a sound like rushing air overhead, getting louder. My first thought was, "The missiles are coming down." (I know, you can't actually hear a falling missile before it hits. I'd just woken up, cut me some slack.) I remember thinking that I hoped I was near ground zero so I'd die quickly rather than from burns and radiation. But after a few seconds the sound resolved into the familiar chopping of rotor blades, and I realized what it was.

 

The under-thirty people can't comprehend what it's like to grow up living with the fear that the world as you know it could end at any moment. I worry that a new generation may learn to comprehend that again.

 

Thanks to the mass shootings becoming alarmingly common place (in the USA anyway), I can certainly understand why some kids live in fear THEIR world will end.

 

Then there's the global warming cliff we appear to have gleefully shot over.

 

[ScottishFox]

11 minutes ago, Hermit said:

Thanks to the mass shootings becoming alarmingly common place (in the USA anyway), I can certainly understand why some kids live in fear THEIR world will end.

 

You can take yearly mass shooting deaths for the entire country and then compare them to handgun deaths in Chicago alone and Chicago will win every year - usually several times over.

 

The mass shootings are nightmares and I live in one of the states that just had one and we have relatives in the area. 

It is awful and I hope the perpetrators enjoy a lifetime of suffering in whichever state-run hell hole they end up in.

 

But, if human life is what we care about and not clicks and prime time views then they are almost statistically irrelevant.  We have much larger issues to tackle (organized crime, gangs, medical errors, obesity, cancer, etc.) that kill WAAAAAY more people than mass shootings.

 

Still, I've had the what-to-do talk with my child and it does not involve curling up under a desk and waiting for death per school instructions.

[Lord Liaden]

 

[ScottishFox]

That video was surprisingly good. 

 

Thanks for posting that.

[Lord Liaden]

I respect Beau. I don't always agree with him, but he's always thoughtful and rational, and he cuts through the bullshit to get to the facts.

[Hermit]

29 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I respect Beau. I don't always agree with him, but he's always thoughtful and rational, and he cuts through the bullshit to get to the facts.

Apparently Beau is not his real  name. And he admits to having played up the accent , but he was born and raised on the Tennessee Kentucky border. Ironically, he diminished the accent in his professional career before hand for the same reason many southerners try to- because there is a bias against it. He plays up the accent as beau for a similar reason, to defy expectations folks have of the southern stereotypes.

 

While I was a bit disheartened at first that this was a 'role' he adopted, it does not diminish his often very valid points- and I've known many a Southerner to Code Switch depending on where they are and who they are talking to.

[Lord Liaden]

3 minutes ago, Hermit said:

Apparently Beau is not his real  name. And he admits to having played up the accent , but he was born and raised on the Tennessee Kentucky border. Ironically, he diminished the accent in his professional career before hand for the same reason many southerners try to- because there is a bias against it. He plays up the accent as beau for a similar reason, to defy expectations folks have of the southern sterotypes.

 

Indeed, he posted a video explaining as much, because some people were accusing him of misrepresenting himself. But lots of people use names other than their birth ones, and most people know them by those. Heck, we're in the midst of a conversation between Lord Liaden, Hermit and Scottish Fox.

[Hermit]

1 minute ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Indeed, he posted a video explaining as much, because some people were accusing him of misrepresenting himself. But lots of people use names other than their birth ones, and most people know them by those. Heck, we're in the midst of a conversation between Lord Liaden, Hermit and Scottish Fox.

 

Wait. You're not Canadian Nobility? 

 

 

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

I'm sorry, did you think my having given you your "Resplendent Recluse" title meant you'd been knighted?