I don't believe those numbers based upon the ones I know. But my circle is too small to be a statistic. I don't want to engage in a left right political argument.
Since you asked, I will say that the majority of the left wants to destroy the republic by getting rid of the only remaining thing that prevents the tyranny of national "democracy" by eliminating the electoral college. Then they can vindictively impose their will upon everyone leaving nowhere to run within the US.
The majority of voters are idiots choosing the lesser of two evils provided by those in power. If a choice between Trump and Biden was the best that we can do what is the virtue of voting? We might have been better served by a random warlord.
It's not hyperbole when I opine that democracy is idiotic when you live in an Idiocracy.
The Electoral College is a leftover from the era of slavery and right now it lets Senators representing under 30% of the population control the national agenda. Twice this century the EC has delivered us awesomely inadequate Republican presidents who had lost the popular vote.
I have absolutely no reservations about southern conservatives being "oppressed" by not getting things their way because southern conservatives are for the most part utterly horrible people. Yes, yes, I know, there are no "good and bad" people, only "our and their" people. Well, not in this case.
Minority rule has done America no good, and just look where it's brought us. A high school dropout in the House, a Libertarian in the Senate, a madwoman on the Supreme Court. I say end the EC and if the conservatives are so unhappy they can secede, operate under conservative economics, and starve to death.
Woah! It has a name. This appears to be a sizable enough tribe within the tribe to cause people to think they are representative. A buzz kill for many conservatives who are not of that tribe, and as big a potential fracture as the woke extremists.
What will be a bigger buzz kill will be for those many conservatives who find they're not extreme enough for the ne regime. We've seen in both fascist & communist societies what happens to people who aren't 'on board' enough.
The blood that runs in the streets won't just be liberals'.
Yep, as Bogdan Raditsa famously said, "Be careful about people whose vocabulary is yours but whose record wherever they hold power is your destruction. Do not be Koristne Budale. Do not be ЁЭШЬЁЭШ┤ЁЭШжЁЭШзЁЭШ╢ЁЭШн ЁЭШРЁЭШпЁЭШпЁЭШ░ЁЭШдЁЭШжЁЭШпЁЭШ╡ЁЭШ┤."
I think that this points to the problem with political labels. The often don't mean what people think that they mean and leave incorrect impressions, especially considering how many would/could not walk their talk.
As you know, I keep a finger in the air by maintaining contact with as much diversity as possible. I often can even see why they believe what they do.
The White Christian Nationalists, if the link is to be believed, don't want anyone in my family in America. I won't be joining their club. I don't think that all Christians are that radical though. My fallout from Christianity came long ago. If I were to spend eternity praising the god who is burning my wife, the woman I love, in eternal torment because she couldn't bring herself to believe a fabulous story, would my eternal heaven be less of a hell than hers?
Are conservatives who shout, "America first" Fascists or people tired of seeing billions of taxpayer dollars going to other countries, too often for wars?
Are the champions of victimhood representative of liberals?
Does the word liberal mean what people think, or wish, that it means?
Are protestors all non-violent or violent because it is what we wish for the tribes we like or don't like?
Are the people who go out and about wearing "tactical" shit any different from people who wear a cowboy hat and boots who don't know how to ride a horse?
I see old Vietnam vets talking as if they are still the lean, mean, killing machines that they were 50+ years ago who couldn't sprint to their mailbox. Not to mention that they were not going against their own government, they (OK, we) were doing what we did with the government's blessing.
I could go on and on, but I think you should be able to get my point. Anyone who is all that a political label says that they are is a standout idiot in a crowd of idiots. Most of the talk, especially on the internet, is empty talk. I think that fears of widespread violence are overblown (I sure hope I'm right about that).
If I was worried about blood in the streets I'd go out and buy an AR-15 (I don't have one) and think that anyone worried about it who doesn't have one is just talking. From what I've been reading, current AR-15 buyers are "liberals." As a friend said to me, "Us lefties like our guns too."
I need to disagree with you on the labels thing. It's been my experience since I was quite young that most people strive to fit into categories. They look for some movement or some fad to swear allegiance to and they put a lot of effort into maximizing their conformity.
This is everywhere. From the MAGA fools to whom "Trump won" is an iconic declaration of crazy to the "trans" crowd with its inane ideological rigidity to the enthusiastic adoption of fads.
I am on a job site called Braintrust that has turned out to be utterly useless. When I started to gripe about 90% of the jobs being marked "US only" when half the the freelancers on there reside outside the USA, I got a message from one of the staff that opened with
"I am reaching out to share [the rules of online engagement]," (which I had not violated at all).
Reach out? Share? WTF does that even mean? Why not plain speech like "I am emailing you to remind ..." but this is the new corpspeak and everyone is doing it.
Nobody had to indoctrinate them. They saw other people writing this burble and leapt right on board.
Most people are compulsively conformist. Most people look for something to join. Political attitudes in the USA are not a continuum like height or intelligence, they are a bimodal distribution and we are getting ever further apart. Under Bush we could live with each other; since Trump, we are divided into distinct camps and I see little chance of this reversing anytime soon.
You've probably heard the one about an alien invasion from outer space being the only thing that would unite humanity. Right now I would not even bet on that.
When the new corporate speak was beginning, we made paper buzzword/bullshit BINGO cards and some of us took them to meetings. When someone, usually a manager, used one of those ridiculous words if it was on our card word mark it. At some point in the meeting someone would say, "BINGO! that a good point you were making" or some other nonsense to make it less obvious that we were making fun of corporate speak. it didn't stay a secret long.
Sadly, making fun of some of the new words could get you fired.
I'm in agreement with that but you also address the idea that I expressed. In the new order of the 21st Century it is hard to cling to the group identities of the old order. They have become so fractured that people increasingly either reject them outright or clarify their subgroup.
You for an example, a long-time proud liberal, do not fit under the Orwellian new definitions the radicals impose. I am seeing an increasing number of people seceding from groups they were previously comfortable in.
I think it is the result of subgroups trying to claim membership where they don't fit. A glaring example is LGBTQ[whatever else is being added]. The L & G people have an attraction to their own sex (something in common). Sex is fun. The B people are happy to have it with whomever will participate with them. If they have a preference, they seem to be able to get past it. The T people are split between the dysphoric and non-dysphoric. The Q people are outrage junkies. I don't see it as a unified group/tribe and think that some actually despise or hold one or mor of the others in contempt.
Perhaps it time to dust off our copies of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals." in a strange new world where it is radical to be rational. While I dislike the "enemies" world, sometimes we do have genuine enemies. Hopefully without thinking we must kill them, rather than their ideas.
I hope you're right about the violence too. I'm never sure if I have a skewed idea of how crazy America has become because I haven't lived there in nearly 18 years, or whether those who are still there are the ones who need their head examined. There's some crazy shit going down there, and I was reading some Canadian articles yesterday analyzing the possibility of a US civil war, and how that would impact Canada. And I was like, shit, 35 million people are screwed unless we all head up to the mountains and let the military hordes have Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. We've still got plenty of water up there, and maybe we can train the polar bears to attack anything red white and blue :)
I worry about my family there. They're in Michigan now, but my bro and his wife are going to move to NC after my mother passes on and I really don't think they've thought this thing through.
Glad to hear though that you don't think it's time yet to buy an AR. If a grizzled old Vietnam vet isn't crapping his drawers yet, maybe there's hope...or maybe you just need your head examined :P
I just read an article that US alcohol deaths went up like 30% in the first year of the pandemic. I know opioid deaths spiralled during the pandemic, and many were believed to be intentional overdoses - i.e., suicides.
Then again, maybe the Big One is just around the corner if no one stops Putin and most of us won't be around for Christmas :P
If violence comes, I don't think it will be like the war of secession with uniformed armies. I think its most likely form would be terrorist tactics. If it goes past assassination attempts on politicians to non-government members of the other tribe, uniforms will be political bumper stickers and shirts. I have some shirts from years ago that I never wear, they'd make good rags. Bumper stickers, hell no. No matter which tribe. they make you a target of the other tribe. Who knows if and when that might happen. You could have a house full of guns and ammo and get sniped. Better to do as little as possible to make yourself a target of opportunity.
When I lived in the States I had anti-Bush bumper stickers in my car and my tires kept getting slashed. I had no enemies, no crazy exes, I figured it must be the bumper stickers. As much as I resented having to take them off - early right-wing censorship (today it's more left-wing censorship), I consoled myself thinking, "They won the battle but I won the war. They have to live in this shitty country that's destroying them and I'm moving to a free country.' Kind of an ugly thing to think about the mother country but that's how I felt twenty years ago...the US was going downhill but I had no idea how bad it was going to get.
What weirds me out is going down there and knowing some nutbag with a gun and a grievance could show up and mow everyone down. While i realize the likelihood of that happening is fairly small, it's not as small as it was a few years ago. But then I walk into a CVS or a Kroger's or something and everyone's all normal and stuff.
We don't have to agree on everything since neither of us have the power to change the world. Lest you forget, I tilt left or right on individual issues rather than in conformance with a political tribe.
It is common for people to say the party (tribe) moved away from their values like Jim Webb & Tulsi Gabbard did when the tribe doesn't align with their values. I hear people talking about RINOs or extreme left or right when it's just a matter of the population of the tribes not being a monolith. I reject all tribal labels since none of them define me.
The one who surprised me was George Will. but on reflection, not so surprising. He didn't become a Democrat, and probably the only reason he bailed was because his patrician pretenses were irreconcilable with Trump's crudity.
BTW he has had that same stock photo since I can remember, and he's 81 now. So it's at least 35 years out of date.
Maybe labels don't accurately define me or thee but go over to the other side and you won't find a hell of a lot of ideological diversity.
Unfortunately what I think conservatives in a theoretical "Jesusstan" would do is arm up and invade what's left of the United States. After all, they don't want their own country, they want to overthrow the one we've got. I was horrified the other day to see somewhere - forget whether it was social media or a website or a news story - in which they claimed Democrats 'want to kill us all.'
Sounds very seriously like projection to me. This is what Trump did, tell us what he was thinking himself by saying his enemies wanted to do this or that. I think these people seriously are going to start 'coming after the libs' soon like they just did for Nancy Pelosi.
I'm going to stand up for the Democrats a bit here. I know they're their own mess; they don't have all the answers; and they're part of the problem. But why is Biden considered not much better than Trump? Why was Obama similarly maligned? Let's remember the Republicans make it a point to a) Never do anything to help the American people unless they're rich enough to be their base and b) Never let the Democrats do anything good for the American people just because.
However, I do agree with your contention that the majority of voters are idiots who vote for their own obstacles to the changes they say they want to see.
So they may turn Congress back to the Republicans because they don't like the economy? Oy.
Only hatred of Trump would allow people to ignore Biden's mental state. Its not worthy of argument. If you don't see it you just don't want to see it.
As for the economy, hell yes it matters. The people the Democrats claim to represent suffer the worst. I walk past people living in the park because they can't afford a basic low end middle class. What matters more than, a roof over your head, a job, not having to choose between food and child care. People with children liked working from home when school was out so they could eat. Stores are shuttered all over the place. Put out of business by the panic that cured the flue.
Obama, I didn't mention Obama. His presidency was an order of magnitude better.
I think he shows the "slowed-down" aspect of his age but fogginess, drifting? No. Don't see it.
OTOH at his age every passing year is going to take more away and six years from now he might not even know where he is half the time.
But this mileage varies. Pablo Casals was at 96 playing gifted interpretation of Bach figured bass pieces for cello and that is extremely demanding numerical musicianship.
We *all* get a big slower as we get older...around age 37 is when you start walking into a room, can't remember why you came there, and start to worry you've got Early Onset Dementia. My mother was - I thought - a real space case when she was my age, now I'm that age and I realize her problem wasn't brain fluffiness but she was just *OLD* :) And Biden is much older than any of us, except my mother ;) Who sitll doesn't have dementia although she's definitely in no mental condition to lead the country (she's 90). I see none of the problems with Biden that I see with Mom although I don't monitor him 24x7. Mostly he reminds me of a classic movies-era cowboy with the flinty eyes and the gravely voice and the more take-no-shit attitude. Is he fuzzier than you and I? Undoubtedly, but I'll bet we'll never be that smart when we're 80.
He's STILL got more going on than the Orange Menace, who couldn't complete a thought beyond the capability of a fourth grader, and if you compare Trump to the interviews Trump gave when he was much younger, like in his fifties, he was a lot more eloquent and less crazy-sounding. Biden wasn't my first pick either but that' who the Dems went with and hell, i'd have voted for Homer Simpson over Trump.
I was forgetting what I came downstairs for when I was 18. I was smoking a lot of weed. Short term memory loss is a well-known thing. We laughed about it.
Sometimes I find myself groping for a word, but that isn't new.
No, when he was younger he was pretty conservative. And anyway the memory effects are temporary, you forget while you're stoned, not for the rest of your life.
I smoked a lot of strong weed for decades, then quit around 1990 and when I started again six years later I smoked much, must less. Stoned I aced calculus exams in college; stoned I wrote code at Microsoft. My memory is fine, especially for numbers.
I don't think Biden is in much bad shape. I'd certainly trust his mind more than Trump or Walker.
Biden was tough on crime, and you can find video of him as a young Senator speaking with a stutter or word salads. I don't think it was pot.
A thing that I notice that people who have never cared for a loved one with dementia is the way his wife, handlers and even vice-President direct him to keep him from wandering, both in speech and action. It reminds me of the way my sisters and I had to care for our mom in her final years. A sad, but familiar sight.
Not trying to argue, our opinions are our own based upon our own experience.
True, you didn't have to hate Trump to see it. Anyone who has lived with a loved one with dementia would recognize the signs clearly. My reference was to what it would take to willfully ignore/deny it, Trump hate or partisanship.
As for "right-wing sources" reporting it, of course. You don't expect the left-wing sources to mention it do you? I use WSJ, Reuters, Asia Times, CNN, NPR, Reason and Daily Wire to get a spread across the spectrum of bias. When I was young and my hearing supported it and there was no internet, I was a short-wave radio listener. VOA, BBC, Russia, Voice of Vietnam via Cuba (I heard Jane Fonda's speech), and miscellaneous stations depending upon condition to get that spread. None of those supply discernment, you must supply your own. If you are not too partisan for that you step out of the echo chamber.
As an interesting side note, at one time I had a job analyzing RF signals pertaining to electronic warfare. Between missions I was listening to the VOA broadcast of a UN security council meeting. Anwar S─Бd─Бt was making the US look like absolute assholes and the signal appeared to fade until he could not be heard. There was no fade, the signal was tall and proud on my spectrum analyzer. The noise was modulated in at the source on every VOA frequency. When he finished speaking the fade went away. The Voice of America had jammed itself! A lesson about media bias when I was a young man that led to my quest for information source diversity.
How often does All Sides update that chart? Because I recognize several that jump up and down, back and forth on factualism and bias. I wouldn't put the National Review as far right as they have, but it's still for sure right-wing. Cnn & Fox News both bounce up and down for factualism, so does MSNBC. The Epoch Times and the Washington Examiner are both far right, not sort of right. I prefer Media Bias Fact Check myself, although none of them are the final word on everything.
Maybe I don't know the signs of dementia when I see them, but I do watch for them in my mother, and from what I read in Bob Woodward's books, Trump was handled like a spoiled, easily distracted child by his handlers when he was in office. I don't know if folks are doing the same to Biden but I suspect not. Are you sure it's dementia and not just encroaching old age? Like I said, we all get a little fuzzier as we get older, I can literally completely forget something from a few days previously and it's not that I'm getting senile, that's just how older age is for many of us and my mother was the same at my age...yet 31 years later, at 90, she's sharper than Trump. I dunno, I just don't see it in Biden but then again, we had no idea Reagan was getting fuzzy in his old age, and supposedly his family & handlers hid it from the American public until his second term was over.
I wrote that you must supply your own discernment too all needs sources. The best you can do is seek variety.. You're picking fly crap out of the pepper shaker with toothpick chopsticks trying to find fault with my non -medical opinion about one subject, Biden's mental fitness to be POTUS. That's not about partisanship. Call it what you like, but claiming he is ok to be POTUS is stunning.
I don't know why you keep mentioning Trump, be has nothing to do with it. Yeah Trump was a dumpster fire but he is no longer in office and has nothing to do with Biden.
You haven't yet explained why you thought Biden was showing signs of dementia. Although I understand better where you get your news, I still don't know why you think he's getting fuzzy.
I've listened to his responses to questions and critics. He seems pretty sharp to me. He tracks just fine, while Trump can't speak a coherent sentence without weaving into one of his grievances or his stock phrases ("crooked Hillary," "with hunt," "China virus") and he never uses conjunctive adverbs like "however" at all.
Thirty percent of the right wants fascism. Seventy percent believes Trump won.
What is comparable on our side?
I don't believe those numbers based upon the ones I know. But my circle is too small to be a statistic. I don't want to engage in a left right political argument.
Since you asked, I will say that the majority of the left wants to destroy the republic by getting rid of the only remaining thing that prevents the tyranny of national "democracy" by eliminating the electoral college. Then they can vindictively impose their will upon everyone leaving nowhere to run within the US.
The majority of voters are idiots choosing the lesser of two evils provided by those in power. If a choice between Trump and Biden was the best that we can do what is the virtue of voting? We might have been better served by a random warlord.
It's not hyperbole when I opine that democracy is idiotic when you live in an Idiocracy.
You and I are often in agreement. Not this time.
The Electoral College is a leftover from the era of slavery and right now it lets Senators representing under 30% of the population control the national agenda. Twice this century the EC has delivered us awesomely inadequate Republican presidents who had lost the popular vote.
I have absolutely no reservations about southern conservatives being "oppressed" by not getting things their way because southern conservatives are for the most part utterly horrible people. Yes, yes, I know, there are no "good and bad" people, only "our and their" people. Well, not in this case.
Minority rule has done America no good, and just look where it's brought us. A high school dropout in the House, a Libertarian in the Senate, a madwoman on the Supreme Court. I say end the EC and if the conservatives are so unhappy they can secede, operate under conservative economics, and starve to death.
Woah! It has a name. This appears to be a sizable enough tribe within the tribe to cause people to think they are representative. A buzz kill for many conservatives who are not of that tribe, and as big a potential fracture as the woke extremists.
https://asiatimes.com/2022/11/white-christian-nationalists-on-us-midterm-election-mission/
What will be a bigger buzz kill will be for those many conservatives who find they're not extreme enough for the ne regime. We've seen in both fascist & communist societies what happens to people who aren't 'on board' enough.
The blood that runs in the streets won't just be liberals'.
Sorta like the French Revolution where a lot of people who had been at its center ended up losing their heads.
Authoritarianism always looks like a good idea to those who favour such personalities...until the paranoia sets in.
Yep, as Bogdan Raditsa famously said, "Be careful about people whose vocabulary is yours but whose record wherever they hold power is your destruction. Do not be Koristne Budale. Do not be ЁЭШЬЁЭШ┤ЁЭШжЁЭШзЁЭШ╢ЁЭШн ЁЭШРЁЭШпЁЭШпЁЭШ░ЁЭШдЁЭШжЁЭШпЁЭШ╡ЁЭШ┤."
I think that this points to the problem with political labels. The often don't mean what people think that they mean and leave incorrect impressions, especially considering how many would/could not walk their talk.
As you know, I keep a finger in the air by maintaining contact with as much diversity as possible. I often can even see why they believe what they do.
The White Christian Nationalists, if the link is to be believed, don't want anyone in my family in America. I won't be joining their club. I don't think that all Christians are that radical though. My fallout from Christianity came long ago. If I were to spend eternity praising the god who is burning my wife, the woman I love, in eternal torment because she couldn't bring herself to believe a fabulous story, would my eternal heaven be less of a hell than hers?
Are conservatives who shout, "America first" Fascists or people tired of seeing billions of taxpayer dollars going to other countries, too often for wars?
Are the champions of victimhood representative of liberals?
Does the word liberal mean what people think, or wish, that it means?
Are protestors all non-violent or violent because it is what we wish for the tribes we like or don't like?
Are the people who go out and about wearing "tactical" shit any different from people who wear a cowboy hat and boots who don't know how to ride a horse?
I see old Vietnam vets talking as if they are still the lean, mean, killing machines that they were 50+ years ago who couldn't sprint to their mailbox. Not to mention that they were not going against their own government, they (OK, we) were doing what we did with the government's blessing.
I could go on and on, but I think you should be able to get my point. Anyone who is all that a political label says that they are is a standout idiot in a crowd of idiots. Most of the talk, especially on the internet, is empty talk. I think that fears of widespread violence are overblown (I sure hope I'm right about that).
If I was worried about blood in the streets I'd go out and buy an AR-15 (I don't have one) and think that anyone worried about it who doesn't have one is just talking. From what I've been reading, current AR-15 buyers are "liberals." As a friend said to me, "Us lefties like our guns too."
I need to disagree with you on the labels thing. It's been my experience since I was quite young that most people strive to fit into categories. They look for some movement or some fad to swear allegiance to and they put a lot of effort into maximizing their conformity.
This is everywhere. From the MAGA fools to whom "Trump won" is an iconic declaration of crazy to the "trans" crowd with its inane ideological rigidity to the enthusiastic adoption of fads.
I am on a job site called Braintrust that has turned out to be utterly useless. When I started to gripe about 90% of the jobs being marked "US only" when half the the freelancers on there reside outside the USA, I got a message from one of the staff that opened with
"I am reaching out to share [the rules of online engagement]," (which I had not violated at all).
Reach out? Share? WTF does that even mean? Why not plain speech like "I am emailing you to remind ..." but this is the new corpspeak and everyone is doing it.
Nobody had to indoctrinate them. They saw other people writing this burble and leapt right on board.
Most people are compulsively conformist. Most people look for something to join. Political attitudes in the USA are not a continuum like height or intelligence, they are a bimodal distribution and we are getting ever further apart. Under Bush we could live with each other; since Trump, we are divided into distinct camps and I see little chance of this reversing anytime soon.
You've probably heard the one about an alien invasion from outer space being the only thing that would unite humanity. Right now I would not even bet on that.
When the new corporate speak was beginning, we made paper buzzword/bullshit BINGO cards and some of us took them to meetings. When someone, usually a manager, used one of those ridiculous words if it was on our card word mark it. At some point in the meeting someone would say, "BINGO! that a good point you were making" or some other nonsense to make it less obvious that we were making fun of corporate speak. it didn't stay a secret long.
Sadly, making fun of some of the new words could get you fired.
They indoctrinate each other.
I'm in agreement with that but you also address the idea that I expressed. In the new order of the 21st Century it is hard to cling to the group identities of the old order. They have become so fractured that people increasingly either reject them outright or clarify their subgroup.
You for an example, a long-time proud liberal, do not fit under the Orwellian new definitions the radicals impose. I am seeing an increasing number of people seceding from groups they were previously comfortable in.
I think it is the result of subgroups trying to claim membership where they don't fit. A glaring example is LGBTQ[whatever else is being added]. The L & G people have an attraction to their own sex (something in common). Sex is fun. The B people are happy to have it with whomever will participate with them. If they have a preference, they seem to be able to get past it. The T people are split between the dysphoric and non-dysphoric. The Q people are outrage junkies. I don't see it as a unified group/tribe and think that some actually despise or hold one or mor of the others in contempt.
Perhaps it time to dust off our copies of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals." in a strange new world where it is radical to be rational. While I dislike the "enemies" world, sometimes we do have genuine enemies. Hopefully without thinking we must kill them, rather than their ideas.
I hope you're right about the violence too. I'm never sure if I have a skewed idea of how crazy America has become because I haven't lived there in nearly 18 years, or whether those who are still there are the ones who need their head examined. There's some crazy shit going down there, and I was reading some Canadian articles yesterday analyzing the possibility of a US civil war, and how that would impact Canada. And I was like, shit, 35 million people are screwed unless we all head up to the mountains and let the military hordes have Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. We've still got plenty of water up there, and maybe we can train the polar bears to attack anything red white and blue :)
I worry about my family there. They're in Michigan now, but my bro and his wife are going to move to NC after my mother passes on and I really don't think they've thought this thing through.
Glad to hear though that you don't think it's time yet to buy an AR. If a grizzled old Vietnam vet isn't crapping his drawers yet, maybe there's hope...or maybe you just need your head examined :P
I just read an article that US alcohol deaths went up like 30% in the first year of the pandemic. I know opioid deaths spiralled during the pandemic, and many were believed to be intentional overdoses - i.e., suicides.
Then again, maybe the Big One is just around the corner if no one stops Putin and most of us won't be around for Christmas :P
If violence comes, I don't think it will be like the war of secession with uniformed armies. I think its most likely form would be terrorist tactics. If it goes past assassination attempts on politicians to non-government members of the other tribe, uniforms will be political bumper stickers and shirts. I have some shirts from years ago that I never wear, they'd make good rags. Bumper stickers, hell no. No matter which tribe. they make you a target of the other tribe. Who knows if and when that might happen. You could have a house full of guns and ammo and get sniped. Better to do as little as possible to make yourself a target of opportunity.
When I lived in the States I had anti-Bush bumper stickers in my car and my tires kept getting slashed. I had no enemies, no crazy exes, I figured it must be the bumper stickers. As much as I resented having to take them off - early right-wing censorship (today it's more left-wing censorship), I consoled myself thinking, "They won the battle but I won the war. They have to live in this shitty country that's destroying them and I'm moving to a free country.' Kind of an ugly thing to think about the mother country but that's how I felt twenty years ago...the US was going downhill but I had no idea how bad it was going to get.
What weirds me out is going down there and knowing some nutbag with a gun and a grievance could show up and mow everyone down. While i realize the likelihood of that happening is fairly small, it's not as small as it was a few years ago. But then I walk into a CVS or a Kroger's or something and everyone's all normal and stuff.
We don't have to agree on everything since neither of us have the power to change the world. Lest you forget, I tilt left or right on individual issues rather than in conformance with a political tribe.
It is common for people to say the party (tribe) moved away from their values like Jim Webb & Tulsi Gabbard did when the tribe doesn't align with their values. I hear people talking about RINOs or extreme left or right when it's just a matter of the population of the tribes not being a monolith. I reject all tribal labels since none of them define me.
The one who surprised me was George Will. but on reflection, not so surprising. He didn't become a Democrat, and probably the only reason he bailed was because his patrician pretenses were irreconcilable with Trump's crudity.
BTW he has had that same stock photo since I can remember, and he's 81 now. So it's at least 35 years out of date.
Maybe labels don't accurately define me or thee but go over to the other side and you won't find a hell of a lot of ideological diversity.
Unfortunately what I think conservatives in a theoretical "Jesusstan" would do is arm up and invade what's left of the United States. After all, they don't want their own country, they want to overthrow the one we've got. I was horrified the other day to see somewhere - forget whether it was social media or a website or a news story - in which they claimed Democrats 'want to kill us all.'
Sounds very seriously like projection to me. This is what Trump did, tell us what he was thinking himself by saying his enemies wanted to do this or that. I think these people seriously are going to start 'coming after the libs' soon like they just did for Nancy Pelosi.
It was Empty Greene said Democrats want to eliminate conservatives.
Who? Empty Greene? Like, *kill* conservatives?
Yes.
I'm going to stand up for the Democrats a bit here. I know they're their own mess; they don't have all the answers; and they're part of the problem. But why is Biden considered not much better than Trump? Why was Obama similarly maligned? Let's remember the Republicans make it a point to a) Never do anything to help the American people unless they're rich enough to be their base and b) Never let the Democrats do anything good for the American people just because.
However, I do agree with your contention that the majority of voters are idiots who vote for their own obstacles to the changes they say they want to see.
So they may turn Congress back to the Republicans because they don't like the economy? Oy.
Only hatred of Trump would allow people to ignore Biden's mental state. Its not worthy of argument. If you don't see it you just don't want to see it.
As for the economy, hell yes it matters. The people the Democrats claim to represent suffer the worst. I walk past people living in the park because they can't afford a basic low end middle class. What matters more than, a roof over your head, a job, not having to choose between food and child care. People with children liked working from home when school was out so they could eat. Stores are shuttered all over the place. Put out of business by the panic that cured the flue.
Obama, I didn't mention Obama. His presidency was an order of magnitude better.
None of that is a defense of Republicans.
Your opening line is a little weird. You didn't have to hate Trump to see the clear signs of it in him, and sorry, just not seeing that same lack of mental acuity in Biden. Apparently others have challenged this view too. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/01/brit-hume/geriatrics-experts-say-brit-humes-claim-joe-biden-/
When I Google "is biden senile 2022" all I see is allegations in the right wing media about it. Why do *you* think he's senile?
I think he shows the "slowed-down" aspect of his age but fogginess, drifting? No. Don't see it.
OTOH at his age every passing year is going to take more away and six years from now he might not even know where he is half the time.
But this mileage varies. Pablo Casals was at 96 playing gifted interpretation of Bach figured bass pieces for cello and that is extremely demanding numerical musicianship.
Watch this and tell me he's showing dementia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJTilMtrp0o
We *all* get a big slower as we get older...around age 37 is when you start walking into a room, can't remember why you came there, and start to worry you've got Early Onset Dementia. My mother was - I thought - a real space case when she was my age, now I'm that age and I realize her problem wasn't brain fluffiness but she was just *OLD* :) And Biden is much older than any of us, except my mother ;) Who sitll doesn't have dementia although she's definitely in no mental condition to lead the country (she's 90). I see none of the problems with Biden that I see with Mom although I don't monitor him 24x7. Mostly he reminds me of a classic movies-era cowboy with the flinty eyes and the gravely voice and the more take-no-shit attitude. Is he fuzzier than you and I? Undoubtedly, but I'll bet we'll never be that smart when we're 80.
He's STILL got more going on than the Orange Menace, who couldn't complete a thought beyond the capability of a fourth grader, and if you compare Trump to the interviews Trump gave when he was much younger, like in his fifties, he was a lot more eloquent and less crazy-sounding. Biden wasn't my first pick either but that' who the Dems went with and hell, i'd have voted for Homer Simpson over Trump.
I was forgetting what I came downstairs for when I was 18. I was smoking a lot of weed. Short term memory loss is a well-known thing. We laughed about it.
Sometimes I find myself groping for a word, but that isn't new.
Maybe Biden smoked a lot of weed back in the day :)
No, when he was younger he was pretty conservative. And anyway the memory effects are temporary, you forget while you're stoned, not for the rest of your life.
I smoked a lot of strong weed for decades, then quit around 1990 and when I started again six years later I smoked much, must less. Stoned I aced calculus exams in college; stoned I wrote code at Microsoft. My memory is fine, especially for numbers.
I don't think Biden is in much bad shape. I'd certainly trust his mind more than Trump or Walker.
Biden was tough on crime, and you can find video of him as a young Senator speaking with a stutter or word salads. I don't think it was pot.
A thing that I notice that people who have never cared for a loved one with dementia is the way his wife, handlers and even vice-President direct him to keep him from wandering, both in speech and action. It reminds me of the way my sisters and I had to care for our mom in her final years. A sad, but familiar sight.
Not trying to argue, our opinions are our own based upon our own experience.
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True, you didn't have to hate Trump to see it. Anyone who has lived with a loved one with dementia would recognize the signs clearly. My reference was to what it would take to willfully ignore/deny it, Trump hate or partisanship.
As for "right-wing sources" reporting it, of course. You don't expect the left-wing sources to mention it do you? I use WSJ, Reuters, Asia Times, CNN, NPR, Reason and Daily Wire to get a spread across the spectrum of bias. When I was young and my hearing supported it and there was no internet, I was a short-wave radio listener. VOA, BBC, Russia, Voice of Vietnam via Cuba (I heard Jane Fonda's speech), and miscellaneous stations depending upon condition to get that spread. None of those supply discernment, you must supply your own. If you are not too partisan for that you step out of the echo chamber.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
As an interesting side note, at one time I had a job analyzing RF signals pertaining to electronic warfare. Between missions I was listening to the VOA broadcast of a UN security council meeting. Anwar S─Бd─Бt was making the US look like absolute assholes and the signal appeared to fade until he could not be heard. There was no fade, the signal was tall and proud on my spectrum analyzer. The noise was modulated in at the source on every VOA frequency. When he finished speaking the fade went away. The Voice of America had jammed itself! A lesson about media bias when I was a young man that led to my quest for information source diversity.
How often does All Sides update that chart? Because I recognize several that jump up and down, back and forth on factualism and bias. I wouldn't put the National Review as far right as they have, but it's still for sure right-wing. Cnn & Fox News both bounce up and down for factualism, so does MSNBC. The Epoch Times and the Washington Examiner are both far right, not sort of right. I prefer Media Bias Fact Check myself, although none of them are the final word on everything.
Maybe I don't know the signs of dementia when I see them, but I do watch for them in my mother, and from what I read in Bob Woodward's books, Trump was handled like a spoiled, easily distracted child by his handlers when he was in office. I don't know if folks are doing the same to Biden but I suspect not. Are you sure it's dementia and not just encroaching old age? Like I said, we all get a little fuzzier as we get older, I can literally completely forget something from a few days previously and it's not that I'm getting senile, that's just how older age is for many of us and my mother was the same at my age...yet 31 years later, at 90, she's sharper than Trump. I dunno, I just don't see it in Biden but then again, we had no idea Reagan was getting fuzzy in his old age, and supposedly his family & handlers hid it from the American public until his second term was over.
I wrote that you must supply your own discernment too all needs sources. The best you can do is seek variety.. You're picking fly crap out of the pepper shaker with toothpick chopsticks trying to find fault with my non -medical opinion about one subject, Biden's mental fitness to be POTUS. That's not about partisanship. Call it what you like, but claiming he is ok to be POTUS is stunning.
I don't know why you keep mentioning Trump, be has nothing to do with it. Yeah Trump was a dumpster fire but he is no longer in office and has nothing to do with Biden.
You haven't yet explained why you thought Biden was showing signs of dementia. Although I understand better where you get your news, I still don't know why you think he's getting fuzzy.
I've listened to his responses to questions and critics. He seems pretty sharp to me. He tracks just fine, while Trump can't speak a coherent sentence without weaving into one of his grievances or his stock phrases ("crooked Hillary," "with hunt," "China virus") and he never uses conjunctive adverbs like "however" at all.