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ForumsDiscussion Forum → Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
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Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
2017-02-22, 4:11 PM #881
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
The horrific attack was last Fall.

9/11, never forget
11/9, always regre t


7/11 was a part time job
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-02-22, 7:44 PM #882
Does it bother anybody else that the Bush government started referring to the country as Heimatland?? The other day, WH lackey Sean Spicer addressed a new executive order on the enforcement of immigration laws, referring to the "President’s executive orders that are designed to protect the homeland" (by expelling gardeners). That really does strike me as the kind of phrase that would sound more appropriate when spoken in German.
2017-02-22, 8:13 PM #883
Yes
2017-02-23, 9:37 AM #884
Nur ein bisschen.
ORJ / My Level: ORJ Temple Tournament I
2017-02-23, 6:47 PM #885
IIRC this is the apocalypse thread general, so why not stay tuned for an episode of Software is Eating the World, And Then ****ing it Out Again Edition?
2017-02-23, 6:54 PM #886
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Does ****ting uninitialized memory regions in reverse proxy servers all over the planet count as the former?
2017-02-23, 7:55 PM #887
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:

Cache invalidation
Naming things
Off by one errors
Input sanitization
Memory safety
Updating hard coded constants
2017-02-23, 8:04 PM #888
Sorry, I was unable to parse your post, because you first said your list was going to be two elements long.

I have therefore publicly posted the entire details of your entire life, ever, online. I hope this is OK.
2017-02-23, 8:19 PM #889
Today I checked out a cool looking book from the library.

2017-02-23, 9:03 PM #890
[QUOTE=The New York Times]Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's chief strategist, reassured conservatives at CPAC that everything was going according to plan.
[/QUOTE]

Totally reassured to hear that things are "going according to plan".

2017-02-23, 9:56 PM #891
Why is it that when states want to own slaves or ban gay marriage, it's "states rights", but when states want recreational marijuana, it's "breaking federal law"
2017-02-23, 10:56 PM #892
It's sort of amusing to think how the contemporary popularity of 'constitutional originalism' as a justification for a given policy probably was selected over time for rhetorical convenience.

Like, if I called into Rush Limbaugh's show tomorrow and made the case for the abolition of the Electoral College, you would better believe that I'd be shut down--but really, would the deep reason be that folks in rural states just like the constitution a lot? No, it's clear that the constitution is being used by conservatives, post hoc, to justify policy that is really, really important to them. Sure, we ought to be a nation of laws and traditions, but characterizing it as biased really makes sense when you also consider things like marijuana vs. gay marriage vis-à-vis state rights.
2017-02-23, 11:11 PM #893
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Why is it that when states want to own slaves or ban gay marriage, it's "states rights", but when states want recreational marijuana, it's "breaking federal law"


...or maybe, it could simply be that the gay marriage lobby doesn't have quite so much at stake as does the police / corrections officer / private prison / plantation lobby.

I am beginning to think that it really is conservatives' extreme revulsion to any criticism of anything whatsoever that smells like a market transaction, is what's ultimately blinding them even being aware of the shortcomings of their ideas.
2017-02-23, 11:35 PM #894
I think they have complicated, specific, contradictory, and totally arbitrary opinions about how people should act and how a society should be run.

Like:

"Throw the book at 'em before they do something worse" (necessitating well-funded prisons and police)

"Taxes are theft" (necessitating prisons and police seek alternative revenue sources)
2017-02-23, 11:36 PM #895
Political opinions drawn from an AM radio host's hat
2017-02-23, 11:38 PM #896
Not to imply that they don't rationalize their beliefs. They do. They're all superficially reasonable opinions in isolation. It's just that, when you combine them, you get a culture (not just a government) that's pulled in a hundred different ways and literally falls apart.
2017-02-23, 11:40 PM #897
Maybe they are pulling their ideas from a hat of discarded ideas? I.e., the two party system is to blame, because we have no place to put bad ideas except with the opposition party, which sometimes wins. And conmen will always be around to lie to them and say that the bad ideas really aren't bad at all, just a little maligned.
2017-02-23, 11:43 PM #898
Trump becoming president is just an emergent algorithm of our political machinery that implements backtracking (hopefully not all the way to the stone age).

Sometimes "bad" ideas are good if they succeed in destroying a better but imperfect system. Trump is just getting us out of a local optimum.
2017-02-23, 11:55 PM #899
Trump is a local maximum.
2017-02-23, 11:59 PM #900
(I hope)
2017-02-24, 12:09 AM #901
I wasn't speaking electorally, but w.r.t. all the other havoc the Trump wrecking ball will wreck on society at large.

What I meant is that Trump is helping society progress if you think that right now in history, good = bad.

I had a conversation today with a friend who begrudgingly voted for Clinton, but secretly wanted Trump to win, because he wanted to see the political drama unfold. I told him to read Brave New World

Quote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.


--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
2017-02-24, 1:03 AM #902
I'll admit, I'm morbidly curious to see how the Prime Time Conservative education reform turns out. You know, while we're still talking about self-contradiction.
2017-02-24, 5:29 AM #903
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Why is it that when states want to own slaves or ban gay marriage, it's "states rights", but when states want recreational marijuana, it's "breaking federal law"


It's definitely caused by the same forces which make it so denying gay people service is "free enterprise" but people prefering consumption media with progressive messages is "liberal/SJW conspiracy".
2017-02-24, 12:36 PM #904
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Total change of topic.

Do you know what struggle Hitler was talking about when he titled his book Mein Kampf? In fact, the book was named after his struggle against the media, and the insults and lies he felt were written about him. The book frames Hitler's opinions with his conflicts with the press, and always returned to that issue; essentially, the book was a meandering diatribe against the media, and why Hitler felt they were a threat against the German people. Hitler did voice many criticisms of the press which were likely legitimate at the time, and are even true today - such as powerful interests wielding the press for political gain, and industry solidarity against their own criticism. However accurate his observations, though, it was always clear that Hitler never seriously considered the press a threat to the German people, but only to himself. He was simply too megalomaniacal to distinguish between his interests and those of Germany, even at that early point.

History might have turned out very differently, if only a few more Germans thought that a low-quality free press was better than not having one at all.


So it would seem that Spicy has had quite enough of the lugenpresse giving him hell, and just decided to ban CNN & the NYT from the Friday press briefing, and forbid cameras.
2017-02-24, 12:55 PM #905
r/the_donald is thrilled
2017-02-24, 1:02 PM #906
Interesting that Donald Trump has so much to say about inner city violence, terrorists, and rapey immigrants, but when a white guy murders an Indian man in cold blood for being a foreigner, he clams up?
2017-02-24, 1:04 PM #907
Quote:
Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.


"It's not my fault, I just wanted to talk about the issues" - a trumpist
2017-02-24, 1:13 PM #908
Blut und Boden
2017-02-24, 1:24 PM #909
It makes perfect sense that Vladimir Putin would want a U.S. President, who, while pretending to be a typically American populist speaking to an abandoned working class, is in fact in league with an old-fashioned European right winger (Steve Bannon). NATO & Pax Americana, which was desperately needed by a 20th century Europe that couldn't stop itself from resorting to constant war and internal strife just to feed itself, could perhaps be destroyed if only America itself went full economically nationalist, and even pitted against itself, within its own borders. Rural voters are primed to lay waste to a Silicon Valley elite, "loyal to nothing and no one but themselves and their own messianic ambitions to remake the world into a playground for Übermenschen.”, according to a self-proclaimed Machiavellian conservative-turned-Trumpest intellectual.

TL;DR: solve your country's social problems, or else a foreign agent will stoke them for you, but instead to exacerbate them in order to tear you apart.
2017-02-24, 1:37 PM #910
2017 really feels like the year when America gazed into the abyss, and the paranoid fringe was allowed to exorcise all of its demons by projecting them onto the political world, so that we now all get to physically live in a world tainted by their tragicomic, hellish delusions.

And the liberal tears will be salty, because our nightmare is now everybody's nightmare!
2017-02-24, 1:41 PM #911
Michael Anton is a straight reading of Dorothy Thompson's embittered snob pseudo-intellectual archetype.

Machiavelli's The Prince wasn't an instruction manual; it was a scathing criticism of despotism, and a poison pill for anybody who would model themselves after it. Damn shame he didn't pay more attention when he was reading it.
2017-02-24, 1:43 PM #912
all of the sudden those left-wing professors who ranted about America causing all the problems in banana republics makes sense to everybody, now that it's being done to us
2017-02-24, 1:48 PM #913
I just realized something. Trump is basically making current events great again, in the sense that academics are going to have a field day writing books about what we are now in the midst of. History professors are going to have tons of new material to talk about with their students in 20 years, in a visceral way that hadn't seemed possible unless you go back to World War 2, or maybe to Yugoslavia in the 90s (well or the Middle East I suppose, but for some reason that was never part of my college history class).
2017-02-24, 2:06 PM #914
Silicon Valley is characterized as callous ubermenschen, the intelligence community as a rogue deep state, and the press as liars.

So basically, this is a war on educated, functional parts of society. When you've kicked the intellectual class out, though, what do you have left? Alternative facts?

How did that alternative (non-Semitic) math thing work out for the Reich?

Reichsminister für Wissenschaft Bernhard Rust: »Wie es seiner Fakultät gehe?«

David Hilbert: »Daß sie nicht mehr existiere, denn er, Rust, habe sie zerstört, indem er die besten Wissenschaftler fortgejagt habe.«
2017-02-24, 2:15 PM #915
Cleansing US math from Muslim influences would be totally fine. I can't see anything wrong with that.
2017-02-24, 2:16 PM #916
George Soros...
2017-02-24, 2:24 PM #917
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Cleansing US math from Muslim influences would be totally fine. I can't see anything wrong with that.


Heh. Well who needs al-jabr.

(Not to mention these.)
2017-02-24, 2:43 PM #918
Haha how did I ever miss this

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” --H.L. Mencken
2017-02-24, 3:17 PM #919
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Michael Anton is a straight reading of Dorothy Thompson's embittered snob pseudo-intellectual archetype.

Machiavelli's The Prince wasn't an instruction manual; it was a scathing criticism of despotism, and a poison pill for anybody who would model themselves after it. Damn shame he didn't pay more attention when he was reading it.


Well, not many Machiavelli historians would agree. I mean the effects predicted by that reading are probably true, but it's more likely that Machiavelli was a moron.
2017-02-24, 3:35 PM #920
Machiavelli dedicated the book to the despots who, just months earlier, had him tortured and banished from Florence.
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