“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
In case you missed it, apparently Lev Parnas is now throwing Devin Nunes under the bus, too, and is going to tell Congress about how he helped arrange meetings between Nunes and a former Ukrainian prosecutor to dig up dirt on the Bidens.
"If you are ever asking yourself 'Is Trump lying or is he stupid?', the answer is most likely C: All of the Above" - Seth Meyers
And those Tea partiers are now... losing.
I think the republicans have considered the tea partiers to be useful idiots, much like Trump... easily angered people that they can count on to blindly vote for them and who will gobble up whatever pablum they're tossed. But now the inmates are starting to run the asylum. And while I'd say the republicans deserve it, the rest of us have to deal with their shortsightedness.
Ditch them. Cut loose the tea partiers; they're a dying sect in their last convulsive spasm. The republicans shifting more towards the center are the only thing that's going to keep their party afloat. They need win back the women, educated people, young people, and minorities they've utterly repelled from their party. And that's not going to happen if they keep courting lunatics. Trump was that last spasm convincing them that the Tea Part still held merit. But being handed a defeat for doubling down on what they were already told was a losing prospect, and one that they only barely scraped by on?
And again, let me be clear... I'm saying this is what the Republicans need to do to stay a legitimate political party. I really couldn't care less if they pull it off or not. What's important is that they're no longer in power. Whether they ever return to power afterwards is immaterial to me, and, by my estimation, only really possible if they thoroughly rebrand themselves.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Well, the situation they're in now is that incumbents are losing to Trumplicans in the primaries and then the Trumplicans are losing the general election even in Republican states. So, Republicans are pretty fucked right now. The Republican voters want Trumplicans, but Trumplicans struggle even in elections they should win in landslides.
Not really, while the Republicans go for the jugular at every opportunity and even if they have legit thing to go after they will lie and create it. The Democrats have to be drug kicking and screaming to the point they have no choice before they act too often.
Even now they have repeatedly refused to send the Sargent of Arms to enforce their subpoenas at which point they need to quit pretending like they have subpoena power because any power that is not enforced is a power you effectively don't have.
They waited till the evidence was so overwhelming that even the cast from the Bird Box couldn't be able to deny it.
Just like when it comes to decent legislation, when they have no power, they might speak a good game, but when they get power, they get timid and refuse to do stuff unless forced to and try to "Work across the isle" which basically lets them compromise it down to nothing.
Kinda like they want to get the money and power from the Republicans but don't want to actually change too much from them to get it because they want that money and gravy train too.
Not playing the whole "Both Sides" game, they aren't even on the same plane of existence when it comes to just how fucked up the Republicans are compared to the Democrats. I am just saying that while the Republicans try and fuck stuff up, the Democrats largely seem like they only want to keep stuff rolling and correct mainly the most extreme impulses of the fringe right unless they lose too much power otherwise.
Since we can't call out Trolls and Bad Faith posters and the Ignore function doesn't actually ignore it. Add
"mmo-champion.com##li.postbitignored"
to your ublock or adblock filter to actually ignore ignored posters. Now just need a way to ignore responses to them as well.
The white House. They won't soul search, they'll look for excuses not to. Remember McCain and Romney in their eyes lost because they were not right wing enough.
Then there's also the winner take all issues in the primaries, even if "sane" republicans do run in 2024 it'll only need one insane nutter to try again knowing they'll get the extreme vote by themselves while the others split it between them much like Trump did. Then they'll do what they're good at secure the base (while the centre and left of Democrats once again go at each other's throats.) meaning they'll get a better chance than they should.
We don't need that, we don't want the Republicans to move to the center. We need them to die and dissolve. We already have a right leaning party, the Democrats.
We need an actual left leaning party those to the left of the Center Right have an actual option. The only way we need the Republicans to survive is if we actually start allowing 3rd,4th and 5th+ parties to be viable with ranked choice of some kind.
Having the option between fucked up and massively fucked up aren't that great for people who actually want real fixes instead of placating measures that try and preserve the political football to keep being punted in future elections.
Since we can't call out Trolls and Bad Faith posters and the Ignore function doesn't actually ignore it. Add
"mmo-champion.com##li.postbitignored"
to your ublock or adblock filter to actually ignore ignored posters. Now just need a way to ignore responses to them as well.
@Rozz I thought this might be helpful in the OP so it can be easily referenced since it keeps coming up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/u...erference.html
Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says
Moscow has run a yearslong operation to blame Ukraine for its own 2016 election interference. Republicans have used similar talking points to defend President Trump in impeachment proceedings.
Last edited by Skroe; 2019-11-23 at 08:15 AM.
I want to add onto the earlier point being made about the subtle insidiousness of things like the Epstein meme, in a context of conspiracy theories.
While it's correct that disseminating such theories is expressly intended to undermine the public's faith in the rule of law, let's be entirely real here; the only reason such strategies are proving so effective is because the ground is incredibly fertile for such a crop. Things like "Epstein didn't kill himself" are capable of gaining traction precisely because there is already a general impression in the US that wealthy people live under a separate set of criminal laws, and that the political and judicial system in the US is so vulnerable to moneyed interests people believe that an extrajudicial assassination of the sort being guessed at is possible.
This is one of the truly lasting impacts of Citizens United; the system has become so thoroughly corrupt and owned by moneyed interests that people like Trump are capable of achieving and maintaining office, while at the same time public trust in the system has eroded to the point where Russian trolls are capable of swaying elections with nonsense conspiracy theories.
Watching out for future attempts at interference is one half of the strategy - the other being that the US needs to clean house politically and economically. It's rapidly running the risk of turning into the corrupt sort of corporate oligarchy we saw in post-Soviet Russia.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
This idea is going around a lot at the moment, what if trump wasn't an idiot, what if the next guy isn't... but doesn't anyone think it's the wrong way round. The bright guys have all been and gone, and being bright they never got caught. Trump is just the first to fail.
The problem is unless you follow current affairs, you'll have little idea its a conspiracy theory. It could easily just look like "another perspective".
Rules against conspiracy theories on this and other boards typically mean starting threads about the Men in Black, the Illuminati, 9/11 trutherism... you know, the old chestnuts. But unless you're an active participant in the conversation and a regular consumer of the news, it's very difficult to tell where "additional news" and "propaganda / conspiracy theory" begins.
To give an example I talked about with a mod recently, the two Russian invasion of Ukraine threads, which totaled 3000 pages. Probably the biggest discussion we ever had on a current events topic. Also probably the worst two threads MMO-OT ever had and it set the stage for the Trumphadi disinformation campaign 18 months later. If you weren't following the events at the time, you may have thoought there was a legitimate question as to who the "Little Green Men" were. That discussing it was a legitimate line of inquiry. Everyone knew it was the Russians. The Joint Chiefs testified to Congress at the time "yep its the Russians". They wore Russian uniforms. They even fucked up and had Russian Army licence plates. But here and across the internet Russians played their little game of "nothing is certain and everything is possible".
But it was all a big troll. And that's not just my words. That Vladimir Putin's who fessed up proudly, over a year later that "of course" it was the Russian Army. And all the Russians here, on Reddit, on news forums, and in the media knew. But they were allowed to play their little plausible deniability game, as if it had legitimacy as an alternative possibility because various moderators and site managers across the internet weren't paying attention to the Ukraine story or were familiar with Russian disinformation tactics.
Americans, websites, the media and Western governments as a whole have become far saavier about Russia's propaganda disinformation mischief than they were a few years ago. But there are still glaring holes. And if you're going to have a geopolitics board or a news website with an open response board, you really have to have teams who know the LATEST Russian misinformation topics, and know that they are in fact, not legitimate and good faith argumentative positions.
By the way, we say Russia, but this translates to China and Iran too, even though we don't see much of that here. Chinese government internet trolls are extremely active on websites for Asian countries and try to advance their world view through there and utilize similar tactics to the Russians. In the Middle East and parts of Europe (largely Germany and France), Iran is extremely active doing the same thing, with the intent of undermining Western support for Israel and Arab regimes.
TO harken back to a point I made a very long time ago - our old buddy Eddie Snowden, before he decided to betray the United States to Russian intelligence, spent a lot of time at the Ars Technica forums, in threads very much like this one, sharing at great length and frequency his strange world view. His strange techno-libertarianism was partially radicalized by that community. And that is not unusual. Many, many Western terrorists are radicalized by what? Going to the wrong forum or the wrong website, run by Jihadi recruiters, who tell them that their problems are simple and the fault lies in the corrupt anti-Islam Western Government and Israel.
Point being, this thought that "it's just a gaming forum" or "it's just a internet argument"... "its not important enough"... site owners who have that very 1990s and early 2000s mindset about what the internet is, are being complicit in the co-opting of their property by foreign intelligence agencies and propaganda.
I'll just link my post here to offer an example:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...1#post51898397
The "Jeffery Epstein Didn't Kill Himself" meme? Not hilarious. In fact, extremely dangerous. But unless you look at it in the lens I provided you with, it seems harmless.
In short, nothing is truly meaningless, most things matter, and site owners of all places on the internet are going to have a harder and harder time in the years ahead keeping up with the kind of disinformation Fiona Hill warned against on Thursday, because it will require their staffs to be very much on top of it.
For our part, here at MMO-OT, it is getting better because we finally have mods involved in current events again and who are dedicated to keeping discussions on rails and not allowing for Russian-style "nothing is certain, everything is possible" lines of disinformation.
Really, I'll go further than what I said in the post you quoted. Every single site owner on the internet that hosts any kind of discussion forum needs to watch Fiona Hill's testimony in full. It is a warning for the age we live in, and for what they are ultimately the first line of defense over.
That's why they have to lose.
The past three years of the republican's tenure in office has not been successful. They have not cultivated good will. They haven't gotten any major legislation through. All they really have to show for it is a supreme court justice.
Which is why democrat "purity tests" of whether candidates are "progressive enough" is, at this point in time, only detrimental to actual progress.Then there's also the winner take all issues in the primaries, even if "sane" republicans do run in 2024 it'll only need one insane nutter to try again knowing they'll get the extreme vote by themselves while the others split it between them much like Trump did. Then they'll do what they're good at secure the base (while the centre and left of Democrats once again go at each other's throats.) meaning they'll get a better chance than they should.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.