The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

sorrrrreeeee for assuming you follow trump on twitter
read backwards

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

then I'm a fool. or maybe i'm stretching the definition of global power but if Norway Sweeden Finland or France had had that role I'd think we'd have been pretty well of.

the worse you can make of it is a couple jokes.

not so harmful.

US "exceptionalism", olololol.

How utterly revisionist.

@thetrophysystem

Get back to me when you understand the different between a provocation, and a complete lack thereof. You being labelled alt-right came directly as a consequence of actions that you made. You sniping however many posts after our previous debate had concluded is not directly the result of anything.

It's bait. And I'm pretty sure baiting people into a (usually emotional) response is classified as "trolling"

Why didn't Norway, Sweeden, Finland, or France become a global superpower then? Do you think, what makes them so ideal to you, is incompatible, with what would give rise to a global power? I mean, you allegedly know history. You think you'd see that France contributed much, but didn't stand out on a tier on it's own like the US and USSR did for most of the last century.

Actions leading to results, is all it is. Finland, France, and Norway did what they did, and ended up where they are. Very social-leading places, yet if another superpower on par with Hitler, the Mongols, or Napoleon, were to arise on the modern scale, and Finland, France, and Norway had to defeat them or their western civilization would be dominated under someone else... then heavens help Finland, France, and Norway, because they'll need help.

Military isn't worth what's being spent on it, but it's also not some entity that magically doesn't exist. It's essentially, the thing, that keeps modern North Korea, from being dangerous. They could and likely want to be dangerous, but a western military keeps them from acting, and an absence of a western military would motivate them to try their luck.

I don't even HAVE A Twitter. I can only respond to all of that, with the fact that anyone should be allowed in the military, barring prohibitively difficult medical accommodations.

What's the status quo with medical accommodation in European military service? Can you serve with no legs? Can you serve Transgender? Can you serve with Farsightedness? Can you serve with an existing knee injury?

I'm sure the Transgender one is "yes, but the military is obviously not responsible for any personal medical electives". If you're fit, transgender or not, and you're willing to serve, then you should. The only limiting factor, is having a burdensome medical condition. If you're wheelchair bound, then what the military can do is obviously limited. If you can pass a physical, it shouldn't matter what your alignments are.

And to be clear, saying they are "a distraction to military operation", so is religion, yet we allow soldiers to practice the liberties they fight for, and be of any religion they wish. They still coexist together while doing the same job. There is no reason any sexual stance should change that, as sexual preference practiced on a personal respectful level is a liberty, whether hetero, homo, bi, asexual, or otherwise, as is one's mannerisms of gender too a personal liberty.

Religious accommodations, for instance, for religious appearance and attire, are made, because they don't directly cause an operating hazard, and you see this most often in articles about Sihk who are active military personnel. Transgenders should be able to pass physical and pose no operating hazards, I'm even in favor of field-positions for women because that'd be equal. If anyone, despite their alignment, needed particularly difficult accommodations, like wheelchair accessibility or an injury that will never heal right, that would be just cause, but barring any mass demographic because "reasons" definitely isn't right. It wasn't right before, and I'm sure nobody thinks it's right now beside the "2%" and their vocally-obnoxious stances.

You can call me "alt-right", you can call it trolling, you can call a vacuum cleaner a weapon of mass destruction. Doesn't make any of them, nor does it make you a professional judge of character and definitions. I'm sure you'll tell me you're the guy that wrote Webster's Dictionary or something. Sure, qualify yourself all you want.

While you're at it, just admit you think anyone you don't like is Alt-Right. Every Trump voter, and hell, let's blame everyone that didn't show up to vote against him, just because they're Alt-Right for not blindly following what is asked of them. Then, next election, when you beg, plead, for those unaffiliated voters you slammed to show up, you can watch for the second time in a row as they don't. What? Are you going to take away their... oh, wait, democrats have already taken away about as much as republicans have, so there's little to gain, nothing to lose. We can either have extensive prohibition and prosecution, or extensive prohibition and prosecution. The only politicians willing to lax on prosecuting the small guy, are Libertarians, and if we can't show up for them then there's no motivation to show up for whatever democrat nominee who's a millionaire claiming to support the working class but can't be bothered to establish national healthcare or either regulate cost or monopolization of the markets.

My biggest political target is markets that nobody is allowed to compete in by regulation of FDA and such, but are allowed to charge any price unopposed. We can have capitalism, or socialism, but apparently we chose oligarchy. I literally have no beef with the transgender, no Alt-Right would openly support them and their friends who fall into that group, but I do, because I have unpopular tastes myself, and I want the god damned liberty to enjoy my one life to live and my unpopular tastes. I'm tired of the 2% enjoying their lives and tastes, and damned everyone else. I'M PART OF EVERYONE ELSE.

So easy to label and pick fights, so easy to thesaurus and use internet buzzwords to sound smart, you act like nobody's taken a college level English course in high school before, with fancy words like ad-hominem, and then you ironically turn around and full-on assault me as an "alt-right fascist" like you've never heard the word. So easy to parrot back what all the smart internet users buzz back and forth, so hard to actually approach someone's situation with an actual scientific approach though. Apparently, parroting is easy, and conversation based on rationale is too damn hard.

I feel pretty damn rational, to think that it's ridiculous, every time an otherwise rational civil-rights support group or advocate, turns around and stirs outrage about a Caucasian wearing dreadlocks. Those should not be sensationalist articles, that shouldn't be a sensation at all, because it's just another form of racism. Every kind of prejudice has an ignorant end-goal, like screwing over somebody to improve one's own life marginally, or like getting some perceived revenge against some group that apparently deserves hardship in their life.

no, not in a physical office, in a bureaucracy post perhaps, yes, yes, yes

I think you're missing the point elodea made and that I was responding to. but anyways : because they didn't necessarily aspire to it and because that's not how it played out. that's that.

Hepepep !
hold your horses you have france to thank for most of your legal and government infrastructure layout and texts and so does the rest of the world even china.

We have France to thank for America winning it's independence, France has America to thank for mathematically proven effects in their favor during WWI and WWII, that's kind of how globalization works. You can take any one thing a country contributed and make it seem like an 80% contribution to someone else's entire existence, when it's really a 10%. People in this thread are claiming I am doing this with America right now, taking their 10% and claiming it's 80%.

In reality, I'm claiming facts, and they're claiming problems based on untested what-if scenarios. What if America didn't do everything it does, would we have global peace, would we all be speaking German/Russian/Chinese, would be literally have died off as a species, would we literally be in the same place we are now except with some other country making the progressions that the US had made? What is this, C&C Red Alert? What does what-if scenarios matter? The only sure thing, is that history happened very coincidentally, any subtle change could have changed how anyone could have handled any issue that came up, and we don't have any 1 entity to thank for any of that. Really, we have Russia's contributions to WWII, to thank for Russia having been less influential than they could have been, but you don't see ANYONE thanking Russia in the end either. You do see at least one person begging for kudos toward France though.

That is really the proper response anyway. Someone with legs, can't march in defense of a nation in a combat operation, and we have no technology to reliably fix that, whether they aspire to a military career or not. A desk-job is obviously another situation entirely.

The other 3, should be similar situations. If they can accomplish the regular routine to join the military, then they should be allowed to. Performance should be the only standard, anything else is cherrypicking, and since we fund the military as a people at whole, they owe it to the people to be unbiased in their enlistments. Otherwise, the LGBT should be exempt from paying taxes, nothing is MORE THEFT than having to pay a tax for services you're not even eligible for, like a military career. I feel that way about a lot of services, btw, which is what makes me more of a "social libertarian".

If a knee injury keeps them from doing it, then they can't do it. I don't know how they do in your country without compromising their minimum requirements. If they merely set minimum requirements to be very accommodating, for everyone in their set duty in the military, then that's fair I guess. I suppose a radio operator doesn't need too many physical merits, from a functional perspective.

My friend wanted to go into the military and a knee injury kept him from it, and if there was a standard for entering and he was physically capable of meeting it, I feel he should have been allowed to pursue it as well, so I am only being fair about the fine line between "allowed" and "even remotely able to perform what is necessary".

I have already stated my stance, that as far as the point goes, personal orientations are in no way a performance barrier. To even claim it is one, is disingenuous. My biggest complaints about it, would be:
1) lots of great candidates with heaps of performance potential, not being allowed and hurting the candidate pool we do end up with (which may include people who might actually cause misconduct or other shortcomings). We should accept the best qualified.
2) lots of taxpayers who deserve an equal chance in a tax-funded program. You can't just take tax money from Christians and the LGBT, and then provide services to one and not the other.
3) the situation establishes a "right" and "wrong" to "lifestyles", and I don't think those who think they're "right" realize their livestyles seem about as bland to me as their taste in food probably is. I'd trade their arses, thousands of their bland arses, to get Chester back, because we could use more Chester and less rich snobs micromanaging what's "right and wrong".

Which surrender day? Aug 6? Or Aug 9? You surely know both bombs didn't fall on the same day.

The first bombing was literally showing what a bombing feels like, and a demand for immediate unconditional surrender was issued to stop another bomb from coming. Immediate can vary depending on the situation, but no situation ever qualifies "immediate" as "longer than 3 days". Besides, was Pearl Harbor not barbaric? Didn't the US issue a surrender to Japan before Pearl Harbor, or if memory serves, was the two not even at war when the sucker punch came flying in?

Best to quickly leave a war via surrender, if one does not wish to have "war" things happen to them.

Replace "slavery", with "war", apparently.

@thetrophysystem you literally don't get anything I say nor the intent behind it.

Is this legit? do you literally think that was my intent? trying to get you to apologize for war?

No, that was something I stumbled across, and decided I'd just sooner be happier using them like you use videos for arguments. Just bored of this thread really, running in circles. Unless a moderator stops me, they'll be mostly what I use from this point on. *shrug* This has turned into a crummier version of reddit politics, or a slightly better yet less diverse version of 4chan politics.

Ah, who am I kidding, if a moderator stops me, I'll still probably push my luck and use them until they treat me so strictly, that they at least have to half-arse pretend to treat everyone else at least a little more strict.

Think of it as a form of... protest. You support those, right?

oh yeah. i do.

it's funny consistently seeing you on the other side of issues as compared to the you from the beginning of this thread.

I don't think we're going in circles much to the contrary.

It's funny, I didn't even mention the word "fascist".

But what can I do against such an eloquent wall of text that insults me on a number of personal levels then cries to their parents about "ad hominems".

Beginning of the thread was "me not participating" because I wasn't participating. Not till page 15?

Page 15 was "honestly, I know what Hillary would do, and I know 4 things Hillary said she'd do and didn't or conflicted her own statements. I don't know what Trump would do, but half his **** sounds good on paper, which is a whole half he leads on Hillary in having". That, was apparently the worst mistake I ever made. Not because Trump was terrible, he was terrible even then, Johnson and Sanders were way better. ...but because you guys went coocoo for coca puffs on it.

It's like the single biggest mudfling ever. I don't even like flinging mud. There's nothing to "make fun of " Trump about, maybe because I grew up being told it's racist to make fun of the president (I don't see how that suddenly changes overnight. Maybe because his skin color changed, which technically makes it even more racist).

I'm consistent to an extreme, everything else changes so much, that you think my opinion changed, because the situation changed and my opinion stayed the same.

Or rather, I'm not on the other side of the argument, the argument is literally on the other side of me now.

and now we get the typical anal stage mentality denial....


not much to do except wait. this is something people normally grow out of.

Personal insult detected. Retort: Your mom.

I turned 26 in March, btw. Some people grow out of "telling other adults they should grow up". I'm not holding my breath waiting on you to do it though.

Page 12, no me, just some anti-gun stuff. Btw, the only way we'd be able to remove guns, is to meet all the following conditions; Two separate community-based self-enforcements, one based from government issue and one based from local participation, no fewer, because you can't get rid of guns and also say cops are racist, it's literally either one or the other, and it being both is pretty **** too; They have a quick response unit with firearms, to every single place that "guns aren't allowed", in case anyone gets a metal-workbench and crafts a belt-fed firearm (entirely plausible, but not as much as a pressure washer filled with kerosene and a propane torch fastened to the end as a pilot light). Lastly, strong non-lethal weapons are both allowed and encouraged, including tasers and air-tasers, and are entirely affordable.

In many rural places, that's literally not possible, take note Europe, some people's homes are farther away from the nearest town than France is from the Netherlands. Can you imagine waiting for the Netherlands to send police in response to an armed robbery in France?

Thus, firearm registration is totally plausible, and if it's for the good of a people, taxpayer money should pay for a simple database, it shouldn't be some 18 thousand dollar license, a license being the government's way to steal liberty and sell them back to the rich to mock the poor unless practice proves otherwise. A person keeping adequate response equipment, at least won't be at the mercy of a criminal and a police force's response time. If both suck, the person's dead, and that's not fair to the person, and nothing you can say can explain to that person why they have to die for the good of social prohibitions.

On the other hand, I agree, why the **** are people satisfied with this?

This was good stuff to talk about. Then it devolved to Trump-nonsense, for 30 more pages, before I join in. Btw, That was 40 pages or more into this thread.

I thought that was a valid stance. Whether you like Trump or not, you don't go around rationalizing "all his supporters must be racist, so it's okay to hit living people and their expensive automobiles with cinderblocks, I'm doing the world a favor". It is NEVER okay to hit someone with a cinderblock. If I hit Tatsu with a cinderblock, because he calls me young and apparently has a fascination with me, making him a "pedophile", then Tatsu would immediately see the fallacy in this logic and support that nothing makes a pre-emptive cinderblock attack justified. It's mob-justice, and that barely belongs anywhere, especially in politics, especially against a nearly-equally-supported mob.

And to say the cinderblocks are okay, is to say in self defense that violence is okay in return. I.E. Civil War. Civil War isn't okay, provoking one isn't okay, and if states peacefully divided again, honestly, war wouldn't even be okay to retrieve them.

Ever since then, I've had to repeat, time after time...

Hey, look, you literally called us stupid children even back then! Ah, good times... As if you just pretend that "the US wouldn't have half it's GDP without guns" doesn't translate to "The US probably wouldn't have survived the Indians, wouldn't have helped in WWI and resulted in a completely different possibly totalinarian world, and possibly not have even experienced WWI... without guns." Guns are something that did more than the 1 thing you claim it did and likely did not, which is "account for half of the US GDP". Man, and people say I make stuff up.

At least I started doing it to you too, which means I'm not above it. Or I've lived long enough to become the villain finally.

As far as my "support" of Trump. Nobody has or ever had my 100% full loyal support. Individual ideas do, and his ideas were pro-LGBT, and are now stepping on the toes of the LGBT in a way I obviously don't support. He never even had enough of my support to vote for him, which is the universal standard for "support". He had more support than Hillary, which had "too little support to vote for", but also "too little support to have any faith for a positive outcome in". I can honestly say, I had hope for Trump, a lack of actual history with him just screwing around with power, that made me consider the higher odds of him following up with liberty-based support of Marijuana and LGBT-rights. So far, he hasn't acted in favor of one, and has just started making action against another.

If he didn't make a second term, then... well, hell, if it were him or Hillary again (it won't be), then... I'd hate to say it... I might be waaay more willing to give Hillary a chance to run a campaign and see what her new stances were (and if she was very consistent with them). If it were Trump's 2nd term, he continued doing shitty things, and Michelle Obama ran, then... honestly I'd be totally pissed this was the second election the politicians screwed up for decent regular people, but I'd still consider supporting her more.

...I'd still vote for the next Libertarian candidate. Also would vote local for them. Local republicans are good yet unenjoyable with their stupid regulations, and democrats are big on diversity support and then do stupid **** like red-light cameras and poor funding management.

That's the difference, between me, and politicians. My support changes toward people and the bipolar **** they do, but my support of stances are always the same, because what I support is already damn-near perfect. Politicians, their stance on people is always the same (usually f*ck poor people and f*ck other politicians), and their support of stances are always flip-flopping with who they need a vote from.

I can agree with alot of the above and 100% about the debate being more fascinating when it wasn't about trump.
those economy debates were really interesting.
guns is another matter. I just think it's relics of a time gone by difficult to remove because of how implanted they are now.
And if you're 27 then we're the same age. I still think you're showing clear demonstrable, phycoanalysable, signs of lateness in the cognitive development cycle.
I wish I could sanitize the terms even further. it obviously can be taken as an insult. but it's not meant as one. And that goes for what I said earlier. I mean it. hope you'll take it with that in consideration.

as for hillary not presenting herself again (I'm can only agree) and you not voting trump again even maybe over hillary.... I really respect you for saying something like that.

Personally I'm scared to think bernie won't present himself again. and even if he did he might ******* die mid-term which would be the most annoying thing ever.

but him or someone like him really would be IDEAL for the U.S.
I cannot stress that enough.

I think regardless of our tastes we can all agree this one's for everyone

Jon Oliver bashes Alex Jones :

While I might or might not agree with the above video (still considering whether to humor you and watch it, I wouldn't mind watching at least 1 out of every 20 videos you post) (EDIT: You snuck Trump in there anyway. All he does is MockingSpongebob humor, I could get that kind of politics from 4chan tbh) (EDIT EDIT: Also, he bashes product endorsement during video, while himself being a corporate structured spitting image, "make fun of Trump, network/website profits from P&G endorsements, collect salary". Just because Oliver's a corporate shill, doesn't make him "better", it means he really does fool the sheeple into think he's somehow not a paid political commentator. Oliver's oligarchy-funded, and Jones is anarcho-capitally endorsed)...

I am obligated to post this anyway.


...AND TREVOR NOAH!

You know, if we disarmed every nuke in the world, the first 3rd world nation that wanted to, would just remake another nuke rather simply, you mine uranium and refine it through a centrifuge. My brother works with centrifuges and could literally build a nuke if he were some anarcho-capitalist rothbard.

Same with guns. Guns, automobiles, nailguns, pellet guns, compressor-tubes fitted with shrapnel-loading canisters, pressure washer loaded with kerosene and rigged with propane-torch pilot-light, bleach and ammonia attached to a chemical fertilizer bomb, there are so many ways to make human-killing grade tools. They aren't antiques, they're tools of a very rudimentary nature.

If we're going to ban guns, we have a massive incarceration rate, so may I suggest killing anyone with guns? Yes, kill them. They consume less resources if dead. You basically have to kill them, you're arresting half the country for possession of a common item, which happens to be guns. You'll either try to imprison them and lose, have to deploy drones and jets to kill them anyway, or lose the ability to govern said nation. So, tell me again, how do you just "make guns illegal" and still "enforce it upon gun owners in mass, without guns", without "killing all gun owners and leaving only a nation of the remaining people with no interest to own guns"? A lot of that gun support comes with the military too, so how do you then keep a nation viable with a severely crippled military force, assuming you somehow defeated the military in the first place, without guns?

Basically, we have the military, we have the government, we need to want to get rid of guns, and we see no reason to do so. You did see a reason, so you did it over there. We're the captain here, until magic deathwave ki-blasts can martially enforce the ban of guns over here, there's nothing stopping government rule that favors liberty of firearm ownership. Even if it usually legally limits it to the rich class and their ability to afford thousand-dollar licenses for the good stuff (and any at all in certain jurisdictions, New York City, Chicago, ect.)

Gun bans, are not only impractical, and more destructive than the guns themselves, but something even the government itself will never institute.

Gun legislation, may work, depending on the wording and enforcement. It'd help, if legitimate gun owners, supported the various liberties the legislation allowed them. Cheap license and registration and training and insurance, subsidized by the government just to establish it, and the right to carry in any public establishment and every city in the land, in exchange for what Democrats say they want, a registry and prohibition to criminals having broke high-level crimes like grand-theft, rape, murder, or attempted murder. (anything less is what police try to plea bargain you when they don't have enough evidence and you don't have enough money for a lawyer anyway, so it's a "poor class ban")

TL;DR: Gun legislation works best bipartisan, when you don't have 40%-40% divided support for/against it. Ain't telling you nothing you don't already know.

It took the burn-out from 1945, the elimination of distance between urban centers, and the lack of growing a military as strong as America's (mostly needless again, but it's the world we live in, still, they need to either chill the **** out with the bombings or do what it takes to solve the middle-east issues quicker than another decade of bombing without presence), as the only reasons Europe was even remotely able to try strict gun control. Australia did it way later, and where do you think they actually enforce gun control at? Populated cities. I doubt anyone is actually coming to a person's place out in the bush and taking their guns, with how ******* savage Australia's wildlife is.

Alas, Australia will completely eliminate 100% of their guns, before America does. Why would you expect a country twice as large and almost nearly as rural land-area, to do it first? That's like expecting Somalia, Afghanistan, and Columbia to 100% eliminate guns, before Australia does it.

I'm going to avoid the conversation for a moment but haha, it's good to see this still exists. ;P

I was having a bit of nostalgia for PA and wanted to check out what was going on. Hello old friends!

What a crazy political climate it is these days!

I honestly don't know why I keep coming back. I really force myself to keep up with forums long after the fact, but even this thread is the furthest beyond the thing I'd actually want to keep up with. Avoided it for 35 pages when it started for that precise reason. Had I not been here, certain people would still think they're right, just unopposed instead. (well, lightly opposed, and Mered4 attributes too much to religion which is uncorrelated with the stances, and attributing them as attached to the subject of religion hurts it, some of us support similar stances without religion)

What brings you to the actual forum at large though, @squishypon3 ?