DANGER! - Political Thread

Started by headhunter, Sep 06, 2012, 08:19 PM

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ditty

Many polls show Americans want to hear from witnesses in the impeachment trial.  Please consider calling your senators 202-225-3121 - the prompts take you through everything and you can leave a voice message or talk to a live congressional staff member.  I only give them my first name and zip code and tell them I will not give an address because I do not want political advertisements in my mailbox.

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walterfredo


The Response Timeline of Donald J. Trump (all responses are actual quotes):

January 22: "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine."

February 2: "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."

February 24: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA... Stock Market starting to look very good to me!"

February 25: "CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus."

February 25: "I think that's a problem that's going to go away... They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we're very close to a vaccine."

February 26: "The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero."

February 26: "We're going very substantially down, not up."

February 27: "One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

February 28: "We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical."

March 2: "You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?"

March 2: "A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they're happening very rapidly."

March 4: "If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better."

March 5: "I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work."

March 5: "The United States... has, as of now, only 129 cases... and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!"

March 6: "I think we're doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down... a tremendous job at keeping it down."

March 6: "Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They're there. And the tests are beautiful.... the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good."

March 6: "I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it... Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."

March 6: "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

March 8: "We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus."

March 9: "This blindsided the world."

ericm

Let's not forget this classic from March 13th:

"I don't take responsibility at all".

(Then again this could've been from any day of his Presidency.)
"Where's Jim going?"

sillyboob

walterfredo & ericm - thank you.
Cuz it's been so long since someone shattered me.

walterfredo

Devin Nunes is my (pathetic and embarrassing) representative in Congress. Additionally, my office is directly next to his local field office. He's rarely there, but I see him a few times a year. For years I've wanted to give him an earful, especially the last 3 years. After the crap he said on Sunday morning (basically encouraging people to go dine out with their families)I was pretty upset. Embarrassed. So yesterday I run into him in the hallway and finally had the balls to speak out to him. Again, he's in the office next me, I rarely see him but I interact with his staffers daily. They're all super nice.

Here's how our conversation went down...

So this just happened in my office hallway (Devin Nunes office is across the hall from me, he's rarely here but is today. I see him a few times a year)


Me: "so you really think now is a good time to be going to bars and restaurants"

Devin: "I didn't say that, I never said that"

Me: "yes you did. I heard it with my own ears"

Devin: "I never said bars, don't be misquoting me"

Devin: "so you think it's ok for people to be cramming into Costco and waiting for hours in line?"

Me: "not at all"

Me: "don't you think we should be listening to the experts on this?"

Devin: "like who, the governor? I bet you believe him right? He's the expert right. I bet you listen to our governor"

Me: "no. He's a politician. Don't you think we should be listening to the doctors and medical professionals? Who are saying the exact opposite of what you said yesterday"

Devin: "I said that people should still be supporting restaurants. Take out"

Me: "that's not what you said"

Devin, pointing his finger at me aggressively: "you sound like a real freak"

...then he walked into the stairwell and left.

I shared the above conversation with numerous friends immediately after it went down. NOW! Fast forward about 4 hour later, and he's on Hannity last night. Hmmm...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1239730964089077760?s=20

Bulldog

Quote from: walterfredo on Mar 17, 2020, 02:15 PMDevin Nunes is my (pathetic and embarrassing) representative in Congress. Additionally, my office is directly next to his local field office. He's rarely there, but I see him a few times a year. For years I've wanted to give him an earful, especially the last 3 years. After the crap he said on Sunday morning (basically encouraging people to go dine out with their families)I was pretty upset. Embarrassed. So yesterday I run into him in the hallway and finally had the balls to speak out to him. Again, he's in the office next me, I rarely see him but I interact with his staffers daily. They're all super nice.

Here's how our conversation went down...

So this just happened in my office hallway (Devin Nunes office is across the hall from me, he's rarely here but is today. I see him a few times a year)


Me: "so you really think now is a good time to be going to bars and restaurants"

Devin: "I didn't say that, I never said that"

Me: "yes you did. I heard it with my own ears"

Devin: "I never said bars, don't be misquoting me"

Devin: "so you think it's ok for people to be cramming into Costco and waiting for hours in line?"

Me: "not at all"

Me: "don't you think we should be listening to the experts on this?"

Devin: "like who, the governor? I bet you believe him right? He's the expert right. I bet you listen to our governor"

Me: "no. He's a politician. Don't you think we should be listening to the doctors and medical professionals? Who are saying the exact opposite of what you said yesterday"

Devin: "I said that people should still be supporting restaurants. Take out"

Me: "that's not what you said"

Devin, pointing his finger at me aggressively: "you sound like a real freak"

...then he walked into the stairwell and left.

I shared the above conversation with numerous friends immediately after it went down. NOW! Fast forward about 4 hour later, and he's on Hannity last night. Hmmm...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1239730964089077760?s=20

Look at the bright side, you got a known douche to clarify his comments, thats about as much as you can hope for in his case.

Chalk it up as a victory

walterfredo


ditty

Quote from: walterfredo on Mar 17, 2020, 02:15 PMDevin Nunes is my (pathetic and embarrassing) representative in Congress. Additionally, my office is directly next to his local field office. He's rarely there, but I see him a few times a year. For years I've wanted to give him an earful, especially the last 3 years. After the crap he said on Sunday morning (basically encouraging people to go dine out with their families)I was pretty upset. Embarrassed. So yesterday I run into him in the hallway and finally had the balls to speak out to him. Again, he's in the office next me, I rarely see him but I interact with his staffers daily. They're all super nice.

Here's how our conversation went down...

So this just happened in my office hallway (Devin Nunes office is across the hall from me, he's rarely here but is today. I see him a few times a year)


Me: "so you really think now is a good time to be going to bars and restaurants"

Devin: "I didn't say that, I never said that"

Me: "yes you did. I heard it with my own ears"

Devin: "I never said bars, don't be misquoting me"

Devin: "so you think it's ok for people to be cramming into Costco and waiting for hours in line?"

Me: "not at all"

Me: "don't you think we should be listening to the experts on this?"

Devin: "like who, the governor? I bet you believe him right? He's the expert right. I bet you listen to our governor"

Me: "no. He's a politician. Don't you think we should be listening to the doctors and medical professionals? Who are saying the exact opposite of what you said yesterday"

Devin: "I said that people should still be supporting restaurants. Take out"

Me: "that's not what you said"

Devin, pointing his finger at me aggressively: "you sound like a real freak"

...then he walked into the stairwell and left.

I shared the above conversation with numerous friends immediately after it went down. NOW! Fast forward about 4 hour later, and he's on Hannity last night. Hmmm...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1239730964089077760?s=20

Thank you from Indiana!  I hope you have more opportunities (only for the next 7 months) to call him out! 
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sillyboob

Job well done walterfredo!! Many thanks from SoCal.  I'd love to buy you a beer from a drivethru pub one of these days!
Cuz it's been so long since someone shattered me.

ChiefOKONO

Thanks for confronting him, what a tool!!!

walterfredo

Just popped a bottle of champagne. Today is a good day.

rkwedge

Quote from: walterfredo on Nov 07, 2020, 02:18 PMJust popped a bottle of champagne. Today is a good day.
Great day! :thumbsup:  :beer:
It's the art of feelin' naked in your clothes

LBSUNFLWR

I was thinking Victory Dance!

What a beautiful day and amazing feeling yesterday! Congrats to us all! :)
Even though KY went the other way...


Quote from: Mr. White on Nov 07, 2020, 05:35 PM
Quote from: rkwedge on Nov 07, 2020, 02:30 PM
Quote from: walterfredo on Nov 07, 2020, 02:18 PMJust popped a bottle of champagne. Today is a good day.
Great day! :thumbsup:  :beer:


walterfredo


ranyart


walterfredo


Idiot Redneck

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/

You Don't Have To Choose Between Happiness And Being Informed

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
MAY 12, 2023

"I write about some dark, dark things in this space, and it's common to receive expressions of despair in response to the subjects I focus on.

This is perfectly understandable. Not only is our world hurtling toward nuclear armageddon and environmental collapse while surging authoritarianism threatens our ability to even talk about these things with each other, but most people are completely oblivious to it all. Even relatively politically engaged people tend to believe society's biggest problems are things like sexism or drag shows, and they generally support one of the two mainstream political factions who are both driving us toward destruction.

And this is of course because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fake and stupid. Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in "soft power" (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other power structure in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.

The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what's important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings. That's what you get when you live in a civilization that's made of lies, under an empire that's held together by lies.

So of course people who see this express despair. When you first punch through the lies and start to gain an understanding of what's really going on, it can be really unpleasant at first. It feels like what it probably felt like to be a lucid thinker back in much less enlightened times when civilization was dominated by religion and superstition. Lonely. Depressing. As Terence McKenna said, "The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation."

But it gets better. Or at least it does if you allow it to.

It's not that society starts feeling less fraudulent (it doesn't), and it's not that you get used to how fake and dishonest it all is (you don't). Things like political conversations, movies, celebrity awards shows, even the kinds of jokes comedians tell are still experienced as coming from a backward dream world whose circumstances are completely different from waking reality, and the smell of propaganda brainwashing still pervades it all. But it does get better.

What gets better is that once you've unplugged your mind from the matrix of imperial mind control, you stop looking for happiness, connection and satisfaction in the places the matrix trained you to look for it. You no longer get your sense of self-worth from how successful you can be as an industrious gear-turner of the capitalist machine or how much your body looks the way the ads say it should look. You don't get your sense of satisfaction from how much approval you can win over from denizens of a mentally ill society. You no longer find connection in false tribal loyalties or in shared enjoyment of the buffet of mind-killing entertainment we are served by the empire. You no longer seek happiness in the pursuit of new things to own and consume, or in worthless new goals to attain.

Instead, you begin to see that as confused and shitty as our civilization is, we're still living in an amazingly beautiful world, whose beauty is so much vaster and more ancient than all the conceptual bullshit we've heaped upon the human experience. You start to find joy in real things. The thundering majesty of nature. That spark of authenticity in people's eyes. The crackle of magic at the train station. Something as simple as a piece of garbage catching the light just right can make you coo and giggle with delight like an infant.

And you learn to live from there. You settle into an understanding that while the suffering and abuses of our world are very real and of immense consequence, the fact that there is anything at all is immensely more significant than any of our tiny human problems. The fact that we get to live in these bodies and inhabit these brains and move around on this amazing planet and perceive it and think thoughts about it is a much, much bigger deal than any of our difficulties.

To help you see what I am pointing to, imagine if you were experiencing nothing. Imagine if you were just a disembodied expanse of consciousness, with nothing to see, hear, feel, touch, taste or smell. No thoughts to think, no feelings to feel.

Then imagine after an eternity spent in that state, you suddenly got to experience this world. All the sights, sounds, feelings, beauty. All the thoughts, words, creativity, connections, relationships. Imagine how mind-blowing that would be. How delightful. How appreciated.

If that happened, which do you think would seem more significant to you: the appearance of the world and your ability to experience it, or the fact that the world has some problems?

This appreciation for how amazing it is to be comes to supplant the fixation on the details which used to sit at the forefront of your attention. This doesn't stop you from appreciating the suffering in the world — in fact it makes you more acutely aware of it. But it changes the context in which it's happening, because it's happening in something much more vast which isn't limited to that suffering.

So you absolutely can live a happy, satisfied life with a full awareness of what's really going on in our world. In fact, the devotion to discovering the truth which led you to understand what's going on in the world will also lead you to peace and happiness if you take that exploration inward. You just have to stop trying to get your happiness and satisfaction from the places our bullshit civilization has trained you to look for it in.

And then it's everywhere. Everywhere."
"Seek; for only the seeker may find." - Edgar Cayce

ChiefOKONO

Thanks, that is a good reminder.

Idiot Redneck

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-biggest-problem-with-the-western

The Biggest Problem With The Western Left Is That It Doesn't Exist

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
JUN 2, 2023

The biggest problem with the western left is that it doesn't exist.

To look at a lot of leftist discourse today you might think the left's biggest problem is that some leftists have the wrong beliefs about this or that issue, or that the left pays too much or not enough attention to identity politics, or places too much or not enough emphasis on electoral politics, or is too sympathetic toward enemies of the US empire or not sympathetic enough, or that this or that faction gets it all wrong — but it's not. The biggest problem is that there aren't anywhere remotely close to enough leftists to get anything done in the west today.

And by leftists I of course don't mean Democrats or "progressives" or anyone who just wants a few adjustments to be made to the capitalist empire so that they can afford medicine or a college degree or whatever. I mean real socialists, communists and anarchists who oppose capitalism and imperialism and seek the drastic, revolutionary changes this civilization urgently needs. Those who understand that the system is not broken and in need of repair, but is working exactly as intended and is in need of complete dismantling.

This latter category has barely any meaningful existence in the western world. The "western left" in modern times is either controlled opposition or what amounts to a glorified online message board. That's not our fault; the empire has poured vast amounts of wealth and effort into making that happen. But we do need to be real about it, and we do need to fix it.

And it's just so strange to me that this doesn't dominate all leftist discourse all the time. The fact that the western left is a tiny politically impotent minority with nowhere near the numbers needed to accomplish its goals is the single most significant thing about the western left, by a long, long way.

I mean, if you were a general who was setting off to war, and you only had a handful of soldiers to fight against an entire enemy nation, that would be the single most glaring fact in your attention. You wouldn't be spending your time arguing about military strategies or the history of equestrian combat, and you certainly wouldn't be wasting your energy fighting against those who are basically on your side. Front and center of your attention would be the fact that you don't have enough troops to fight this war, and how can you get more.

If you're an architect who's been hired to construct a skyscraper, and your workforce shows up and it's just one guy with a plastic toy hammer, that's going to be the focus of your attention. You're not going to be poring over your blueprints and books on architectural theory and musing about the finer points of foundational integrity, you're going to be trying to figure out how to get more workers to build this damn thing.

So you'd think that would be the case with the western left as well, because we find ourselves in more or less the same kind of situation. But it isn't. To look at the writings of a lot of western leftists you'd think the best way to enact your ideology in the world is to spend your time arguing with other leftists using esoteric Marxist jargon about obscure points that nobody outside your tiny echo chamber knows about or cares about, or to sit back smugly knowing better than everyone else while waiting for the contradictions inherent in capitalism to bring about its demise.

If you look at organizing and demonstrating it's not much better. You've got sparsely attended meetings with increasingly atomized sects, antiwar protests with a handful of people and one banner, and some LARPers dressed in black punching racists and transphobes here and there to make believe they're fighting a real revolution against real power. Which is the same as nothing.

The first and foremost priority of the western left should be to create more western leftists. You don't do that by having all the correct opinions and reading all the correct books and proving yourself the most correct in argument after argument, and you don't do it by waiting for western material conditions to deteriorate like a bunch of fundamentalists awaiting the Rapture. You do it by reaching out to people, winning hearts and minds, showing them that everything they've been taught about their nation and their world is a lie, and showing them that things can be better.

I don't claim to have all the answers on how to address this dilemma, I'm just highlighting a massive, glaring problem that doesn't get the tiniest fraction of the attention that it should get. I address this problem the best way I know how with my own work, but I'm just one person with one mind. I hope to see many more minds pointed at this issue in the future, so that we can all come up with solutions and fix this thing.
"Seek; for only the seeker may find." - Edgar Cayce