Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!

[Reverend Jones]

The more I learn about Finland, the more I think it's one of the best countries. Not only did they kick the Soviet's asses, it ranks as one of the best places to live, and also isn't glorified by coffee shop socialists.

It's cold

The people there are very weird

[Reid]

Look, I get all that.

But again, what I want to know is just a bit more basic: do people cringe on the inside when they hear Trump or Sarah Palin talk? I need to know how many people think this is normal. I get the feeling lots of people like the folksy persona, but on some level I feel there have to be limits that Trump must be pushing. The only alternative is that I'm surrounded by morons.

I think many do know he fumbles his speech, but I think they feel his heart is in the right place, or something. Or that it has a certain charm, it feels less prepared and more humanizing when someone goofs up? And to be fair, a person doesn't have to be an eloquent speaker to be a good person.

But yeah, if your level of understanding of the world matched Trump's, you wouldn't be cringing as much because of how obviously little he understands things. I think many of his supporters who have some understanding of the world do cringe, and support him out of some cynical power grab. The people who are still hardcore devotees, the middle America people - frankly don't understand enough about how the world works to comprehend how little Trump understands.

[Reid]

It's cold

The people there are very weird

Very weird is suitable to me, but f the cold. I grew up in socal and that's where my body wants to exist.

[Reverend Jones]

I'm sure most Finns aren't as weird, though. Maybe you'll be disappointed.

[Reid]

Recently I had an interesting experience with an Extremely Online person (Extremely Online here being a mild derision at people whose brains are fried from too much internet exposure). I don't actually go out and argue very much on the internet (here being a notable exception), I tend to speak more now only to people I feel friendly towards and just read other debates.

Well a few days ago, I was on one of my left-leaning subreddits, and this person was coming into threads calling people who said Sanders is the most popular politician a liar, and had these factsheet images they were spamming that proved Bernie was less popular.

Well I don't mind getting into the wonk side of things, so I reviewed their argument that Sanders isn't the most popular politician, and wrote up a reply explaining how their reasoning was poor (no good basis to argue against Harris Interactive's methodology, using different studies which asked different questions and from pollsters which have different house effects, different time frames, etc). I then explained that such popularity pissing contests aren't usually done by pollsters because it's quite literally useless outside of Twitter fights, and the data doesn't really exist to support a conclusion either way, though their complaints about the headlines boldy claiming Sanders was most popular were fairy accurate.

I guess I decided to bring hell upon myself because I proceeded to get called quite a few names, including some ableist slurs (like, real ones, not just words like stupid). They claimed everything I said was false, ignorant and so forth. Well statistics isn't my game, and while I knew the person was clearly wrong in many ways, I wasn't sure about some other technical stuff and some street knowledge about certain pollsters. So I went to the statistics subreddit to ask a few questions. Well guess who I guess was stalking my account, found the thread and began spamming me and everyone talking in the thread. It kind of upset me how aggro they gt, and after a few rounds of fighting of this I eventually looked through a bit of their posting history. I realized they post a *ton*, except for the most part it wasn't really all that aggressive (though I'm realizing now the center left has a serious problem with homophobic and ableist slurs). Moreover the person had linked their own Twitter, which I glanced at, and.. I learned a bit about them. They had literally like 20 posts a day, with never more than like, a couple likes or one retweet. Except for one, the first time they tweeted their "Bernie statistics debunked" infographic and had 60 retweets and 40 likes. On their reddit they claimed it "went viral" and had hundreds of thousands of likes. You know that moment where anger quickly turns into pity? I experienced that pretty hard, and quietly blocked the user in all forms.

I don't know if anyone cared to read that, but that was my experience recently with the Extremely Online. Maybe I'm feeling a few years of high stress working conditions and all but Christ, I'm becoming a moral conservative minute by minute here.

[Reid]

I'm sure most Finns aren't as weird, though. Maybe you'll be disappointed.

Heh, I'm sure moving to Finland to fit in because you've heard the people are weird is in itself a weirder act than all of Finland could be.

[Reverend Jones]

I was too obscure, but I was comparing my small sample of two weird Finns to the rest of the country (I don't know any other Finns).

In case you were banking on meeting an army of Fastgamerrs...

[Reverend Jones]

Although now that I think about it, tbh I feel like Fastgamerr is extremely normal. He tries to come across as insane but it's too hard to hide how sensible he is.

Too bad he can't see this thread!

[Reverend Jones]

I think the interesting question is: why is an unmoderated / weakly moderated site still popular enough among more civil posters? (Is there no super secret leftist hangout to discuss these deep matters, or is Reddit it?)

Is it the capitalists again, and their unwillingness to provide moderation? Sometimes I feel like capitalism is a scapegoat for every less than ideal circumstance.

At the least, there should be a sort of "weak blocking" option available to you that propogates the information to your audience that you are uninterested in the sideshow introduced by this stalker of yours.

[Jon`C]

there was an episode of The Orville about this I think

[Jon`C]

I like /r/latestagecapitalism’s response to Reddit’s sitewide bam on content that promotes violence:

If you support the American Revolution, you will be banned.

If you support capitalism, which is implemented through the threat of violence, you will be banned.

If you support regime change, you will be banned.

etc.

[Reverend Jones]

What's with the streak of physically assaulting people that seems to run through elected GOP members?

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) once pinned former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) against a wall and held a knife to his throat during a heated debate about earmarks.

John Boehner told Politico about the incident in a new profile published Sunday. The former speaker described his difficulties in banning earmarks, or measures that funded projects in lawmaker’s home districts.

Boehner said that Young once pinned him against a wall in the House during an argument over earmarks, and that Young held a 10-inch knife to Boehner’s throat.

Boehner responded by staring Young in the eyes and saying, “F--- you.”

Young confirmed the account as “mostly true” to Politico, but pointed out that he and Boehner later became such good friends that Boehner was the best man at his wedding.

This isn’t the first time Young has been reported as brandishing a knife in the House; he reportedly pulled out a knife on the House floor in 1988 when a lawmaker introduced a bill that would have restricted logging in Alaska.

http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know...oehners-throat

[Reverend Jones]

It's things like these that make me think we can learn more about humans by studying baboons than paying attention to what people actually say about themselves. This is just unchecked primate aggression.

[Jon`C]

What's with the streak of physically assaulting people that seems to run through elected GOP members?



http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know...oehners-throat

It's things like these that make me think we can learn more about humans by studying baboons than paying attention to what people actually say about themselves. This is just unchecked primate aggression.

Try selling oil for yuan during a democratic administration and say this again.

[Reverend Jones]

For the life of me I can't figure out if that's admonishment, a threat, or an allusion to something that already happened.

[Jon`C]

TL;DR: Preserving USD as the reserve currency is a matter of national security.

[Reverend Jones]

Impeach.

To anybody here who has ever supported the Republican party, a big **** you for supporting a duplicitous lot who would easily have called for a Democrat's impeachment in the same circumstances. This level of sliminess is tantamount to treachery in this case, and we're drastically weakened as a country for it.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

The two men appeared in the Federal District Court in Washington on Monday afternoon and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was assigned in May to investigate whether anyone close to Mr. Trump participated in a Russian government effort to influence last year’s presidential election. Monday’s indictments indicate that Mr. Mueller has taken an expansive view of his mandate.

The indictment of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates makes no mention of Mr. Trump or election meddling. Instead, it describes in granular detail Mr. Manafort’s lobbying work in Ukraine and what prosecutors said was a scheme to hide that money from tax collectors and the public. The authorities said Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million.

“Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on that income,” the indictment reads.

Mr. Gates is accused of transferring more than $3 million from offshore accounts. The two are also charged with making false statements.

“As part of the scheme, Manafort and Gates repeatedly provided false information to financial bookkeepers, tax accountants and legal counsel, among others,” the indictment read.

Mr. Papadopoulos admitted that in a January interview with the F.B.I., he lied about his contacts with a Russian professor, whom he knew to have “substantial connections to Russian government officials,” according to court documents. Mr. Papadopoulos told the authorities that the conversation occurred before he became an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. In fact, he met the professor days after joining the campaign.

The professor took interest in Mr. Papadopoulos “because of his status with the campaign,” the court documents said.

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates surrendered to the F.B.I. early on Monday and, through their lawyers, pleaded not guilty to all charges on Monday. The two men, wearing dark blue suits, entered the courtroom with their hands held behind their backs. Money laundering, the most serious of the charges, carries a potential prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Mr. Manafort has expected charges since this summer, when F.B.I. agents raided his home and prosecutors warned him that they planned to indict him. That warning raised speculation that Mr. Manafort might try to cut a deal to avoid prosecution. A senior White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, said last week that the president was confident that Mr. Manafort had no damaging information about him.

People close to Mr. Manafort, including his former business partner Roger J. Stone Jr., have said he had nothing to offer that would help prosecutors build a case against Mr. Trump.

“He’s not going to lie,” Mr. Stone said in September.

Mr. Gates is a longtime protégé and junior partner of Mr. Manafort. His name appears on documents linked to companies that Mr. Manafort’s firm set up in Cyprus to receive payments from politicians and businesspeople in Eastern Europe, records reviewed by The New York Times show.

Attempts to reach Mr. Gates on Monday were not successful. A spokesman for Mr. Manafort did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Manafort, a veteran Republican strategist, joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 to help keep delegates from breaking with Mr. Trump in favor of establishment Republican candidates. Mr. Trump soon promoted him to chairman and chief strategist, a job that gave him control over day-to-day operations of the campaign.

But Mr. Trump fired Mr. Manafort just months later, after reports that he received more than $12 million in undisclosed payments from Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president and a pro-Russia politician. Mr. Manafort spent years as a political consultant for Mr. Yanukovych.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched a stealth campaign of hacking and propaganda to try to damage Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win the election. The Justice Department appointed Mr. Mueller III as special counsel in May to lead the investigation into the Russian operations and to determine whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved.

Mr. Trump has denied any such collusion, and no evidence has surfaced publicly to contradict him. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his advisers this year repeatedly denied any contacts with Russians during the campaign, only to have journalists uncover one undisclosed meeting after another.

The New York Times revealed in July that Mr. Manafort and others close to Mr. Trump met with Russians last year, on the promise of receiving damaging political information about Mrs. Clinton.

[Reverend Jones]

See, this is what happened, and it's something David Frum warned about.

These are legal charges. But what was committed were political crimes, tantamount to treason... whether done so wittingly or not is irrelevant. The entire government is rotten and needs to go. And under a parliamentary system, I am certain they would go.

[Reid]

See, this is what happened, and it's something David Frum warned about.

These are legal charges. But what was committed were political crimes, tantamount to treason... whether done so wittingly or not is irrelevant. The entire government is rotten and needs to go. And under a parliamentary system, I am certain they would go.

https://www.salon.com/2015/09/23/noa...he_mainstream/

Remember when I said the biggest political problem in the U.S. is that people vote Republican?

[Reverend Jones]

I don't think the problem is that people vote Republican.

There are two sides to this coin:

1. people are dumb / evil enough in the first place to be disposed to voted Republican
2. the two party system perpetuates the established power structure and propaganda without solving solving problems that also happen to hurt said dumb / evil people

People "choosing" Republican is just a reaction to a bad setup. Of course there are a lot dumb people out there. It is too bad that a lot of them happen to be American voters, but with a better system I like to think even they could have nurtured a governable democracy. But I guess that's an open question.

[SF_GoldG_01]

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fb...rticle/2639203

[Reid]

https://ricochet.com/442941/american...s-media-cares/

Old but gold.

[Reverend Jones]

Gold you shouldn't read far right wing rags like the Washington Examiner

[Freelancer]

I think the interesting question is: why is an unmoderated / weakly moderated site still popular enough among more civil posters? (Is there no super secret leftist hangout to discuss these deep matters, or is Reddit it?)

Don't know about anyone else, but the reason I still keep tabs on this place is that it's glaringly obvious that quality discussion can only be had on obscure discussion forums. Especially ones that don't allow you to express approval or disapproval without actually writing anything.

[SF_GoldG_01]

Gold you shouldn't read far right wing rags like the Washington Examiner

I assume they weren't right wing with a title like that. Oh well, the point I wanted to drive home is that Manafort and Papadopoulos have fallen.

[Reverend Jones]

That's true. I skimmed it and didn't find anything offensive.

Just make sure you don't read the National Inquirer, which is run by a bunch of Trump toadies. But obviously you knew to avoid them anyway since they're an obvious tabloid. The Washington Examiner, OTOH has been stealing editors from The Washington Times, which was the leading right wing newspaper covering DC politics. That newspaper has even more overtones of obvious bias: it was founded as a competitor to the similarly named Washington Post, which the founder saw as "the most anti-Unificationist paper in the United States", and that "The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God".

[Reverend Jones]

Don't know about anyone else, but the reason I still keep tabs on this place is that it's glaringly obvious that quality discussion can only be had on obscure discussion forums. Especially ones that don't allow you to express approval or disapproval without actually writing anything.

I have some thoughts about this, but to be brief: I think that the more obscure the topic of discussion, the less opportunity there is to grow the network of participants by doing "broadcast"-style posts, of which Twitter is the worst extreme example. This way, there is no necessary pretense that your posts will be read by any large number of people, so instead, they're going to need to have some intrinsic value. If you have something very obscure to say, it has a good shot of being original, and this will motivate you to say it, no matter how small your audience is.

For example: The other day, I did some searching of terms related to some cult bands that don't have much currency in mainstream music. Well, one of the results was a discussion forum, not unlike this one, but slightly larger in terms of active members. The search matched a single poster's comments about the particular band I was searching for, and it actually contained a wealth of information. Moreover, almost everything else posted on this board, even by other members, was of similarly high quality.

In the end, I concluded that this certainly had something to do with the obscurity of the band I had searched, no doubt. But you know what? Another thing was that the poster was somewhat old (in part because this was a cult band from the `80's and `90s). That's right, I'm starting to filter what I read based on an age threshold. "Reverse" age discrimination as a proxy for wisdom, on the new-fangled-interwebs of all places!

[Reverend Jones]

If I could make a Roledex of all Usenet posters (excluding AOL users and spam) and magically dox them to see what private message boards they've moved to, no doubt the discussion quality would be through the roof, so long as they aren't already dead.

[Reid]

http://redalertpolitics.com/2017/10/...ed-california/

Most people seem to think there is actually a free speech issue on campuses, but realistically much of it is akin to stabbing a free speech ball.

[Eversor]

This article about the extent to which Hillary had been able to turn the DNC into a satellite organization of her own campaign by taking advantage of Wasserman Schultz's ineptitude and Obama's neglect for the party is amazing: https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ks-2016-215774

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

[Eversor]

Also, this:

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

[Eversor]

Damn is Bernie ever a mensch.

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?

I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.

[Reid]

The centrist cynics are claiming she only did it to sell books. Maybe, but her admission carries weight. People can squabble over whether this could be called "rigging", but that it was unethical seems clear.

This article was downvoted on Reddit..

[Reid]

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/hour...-ever-did.html

Trump still making it clear he HATES judges. Speaking of "quickness", insisting cases be handled quickly leads to shorter, unfair trials, which Trump is working to achieve with his immigration judge surge.

[Reid]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...ffb_story.html

Think this doesn't subvert rule of law? Not directly, but it has effects. Cut corners, etcetera.

[Reid]

"diversary lottery program"

[Eversor]

But now Brazile has provided explosive new evidence for the initial allegations. "The shocking news here is this idea they were exerting a level of control over DNC affairs that we didn't know about," said Kenneth Pennington, who served as digital director for the Sanders campaign. "If you had told me this during the primary — that they're using the joint fundraising committee to get veto power over DNC functions — I would have called you a conspiracy nut."

There’s been a lot of confusion about the significance of Brazile’s allegations since her story was published. Brazile did not allege, as CNN reported in this chyron, that the DNC “robbed” Sanders of the nomination. She also did not claim to have been shocked by the existence of a fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC, since that agreement has been public for at least two years.


Instead, Brazile’s account is explosive for what it tells us — for the first time — about the nature of the fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC. What she charges is that the DNC, when starved for financial resources, agreed to trade a seemingly large part of its autonomy for Clinton’s help raising money — and that this agreement was inked in August 2015, long before voting in the 2016 Democratic primary had even begun.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...linton-sanders

[Reid]

The anti-Bernie people are in full meltdown mode right now.

[Reid]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...-putin-is.html

Best take.

[Reid]

One year later, 75 percent of 2016 voters told Reuters/Ipsos that they were looking for a “strong leader who can take the country back from the rich and powerful.”

Meanwhile, social trust, civic engagement, voter participation, and confidence in public institutions have all fallen precipitously. Polls show Americans are losing faith in democracy itself, and are growing more sympathetic to authoritarian appeals.

Yep.