Trump II; First 100 days

Scuttlebutt
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People don’t hate Congress. They just hate everyone in Congress who isn’t their congressmen.

You and I have a fundamental disagreement of opinion on where the problem lies. IMO it’s not in congressmen or in the government. The government is the same government we’ve had for 250 years, and people were as venal and corrupt 250 years ago as they are now.

The last part of the 19th century saw epic levels of bribery and public corruption. The difference now is that we have epic levels of hatred between the electorate, even though the avenues of getting information to the electorate are greater than ever before.

So, something new has entered the system which didn’t exist 150 years ago. 150 years ago the electorate was at odds with each other but there was not a white-hot hatred of each other. In part maybe because the Civil War drained that hatred to a lower level. But given how quickly hatreds grow I don’t think that was what was really going on.

As I’ve explained several times on this forum: it is my considered opinion that cable news (Left and Right) and the rise of political Youtube videos/social media have put us in a place humankind has never been before. These media are carefully honed–in the case of cable news by sociological experts, at the cost of billions–to be a highly addictive digital drug.

Creating a digital drug wasn’t the point at the beginning. It wasn’t a conspiracy. The point was for media moguls to make money by drawing more eyes to their channel. But 21st century behavioral science and good old American know-how have perfected these media products to addict the viewer by tapping into the human desire to hate the other.

If I were to say that porn addiction is a thing most people would agree. Porn is designed to stimulate pleasure receptors in the brain. For many people this can become a chronic debilitating addiction that destroys lives. I think most people would agree that is true.

But If I were to say that cable news has developed to the point that it is stimulating the pleasure receptors of brain, giving millions of people an outrage-high every time they watch it, precisely the way porn works, a lot of people would say, No way.

Those would mostly be people who are addicted to cable news.

Outrage is as powerful a way of getting pleasure as Porn, and more socially acceptable. You can talk politics in public, but not porn. The electorate nowadays is addicted to outrage in a way it never was before.

You were asking earlier, How do we get to a centrist president. Did you notice few people answered you? Did you ask yourself why? The answer is that the concept of a centrist president is completely un-outrageous. And in an electorate addicted to outrage the last thing they want to talk about is something un-outrageous.

If you truly want to change the tone of political discourse the first step is figuring out how to get 100 million Americans to acknowledge they are addicts.

I’m not joking. I’m not using this as an analogy. I am saying millions of people are addicted to digital drugs designed to promote an outrage-high in them, and there is no way I know of stopping an inevitable conclusion.

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Well, yeah. While I do think a lot of the folk in Congress are complicit, and I hate (strong word - maybe strongly dislike) quite a few more then my own congressman, yeah - we are getting played. Even with in this thread people can’t help themselves from going back and saying Trump is MORE CORRUPT than the last guy! No he isn’t! Yes he is! After throwing around some good ideas and info. And I think I touched on this when I brought up the 6’4" swimmer who identified as a female. That created a media sh-t show that was way, way over the top. Trump is GOLD to the cable news channels. I feel stupid, dooped, just clueless when I think about the things I was outraged about. Don’t you all feel dooped? While I know it may never make a difference, that’s why I posted on here - I had to try something, and among my fellow mariners I felt it was worth the effort.

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Who give a crap about that? If someone is triggered by that idea, they are part of the cause of the problem you are whining about.

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Well, apparently a whole bunch of people did because there was a lot of screaming about it - maybe not on here, but nation wide. THIS is what you focused in on?

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Keep thinking & repeating that if you like Democrats losing at the voting booth. The same independents, middle-swing voters who want equality for blacks, Hispanics, the disabled etc. also want equality for females when they compete for awards, recognition & scholarships. Middle ground voters aren’t going to turn off their desire for fairness for women because the Democrat overlords tell them to. Trump & the Republicans are playing the Democrats that are being steered by the very far left like a violin. Use some common sense for petes sakes. Biological males are different than biological females. Thats why women sports were started? Fairness & to level the playing field?!

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Most reasonable people know that there are not enough trans athletes competing to be concerned about. NCAA president said that out of 510,000 college athletes there are less than 10 trans. In grades 5-12 about 5 trans compete nationwide out of millions. It is just another made for TV/internet problem invented by the right wing anger/fear machine to turn out more of their voters. More ''War on Christmas" BS.

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Is that what “They” say now? On Saturday June 14th I’ll be at an award ceremony where 1 of those 5 to 12 will be racking up the awards again. 2 weeks ago I was at a graduation ceremony called Senior Celebration where the certificates, cords & awards were handed out. At least 3 trans athletes won awards competing in female sports. You should be careful believing what “They” claim when your eyes & ears tells you something completely different. On that same note, senior CNN anchor Jake Tapper & Axios’s Alex Thompson just released a book admitting “They” were blatantly lying to us & their base who believe everything “They” say ate it up hook, line & sinker. Only 5-12 in all of k-12 grades, I’ve seen 4 of them & carpool & on the first name basis with 1 of 'em? According to you & the NCAA President I seen or know almost half of all trans students competing in girls sports?? Wow?!

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You talk like the primaries are not the normal route to elect the president. It’s disingenuous to do that. Why primaries? Probably because that’s the way it’s been done the past 50 years. Because political candidates understand that there is value in the people having a say in the process. It’s called party reform. That is why they went to the primaries. While it’s not binding and caucuses will have the final say, the people can and should have a voice. No one has been nominated against the primary choice. There have been faithless electors but Kamala is the outlier and you know it.

So why have primaries at all?

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Even if just to humor me, do you think that parents want their teenage daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with teenage boys pretending to be girls? No they don’t. And I am happy that this is the hill democrats want to die on. This is why you lost the election.

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It’s not. Before Nixon the US economy had to be doing well for our leadership to swindle their fortunes away. Not since we went to a global economy did they sell out America at the levels we see today. Since 2010 there has been a concerted effort to create division. Both parties are at fault but Democrats made identity politics the basis for their opposition. Most moderates want the same things, they just differ on how to get there. Our government is fragmented. There is no middle ground any more.

Politicians attack the base of the opposition. This is new. 80 million people voted for Trump and elected officials demonize these people because they voted for someone other than them. This is new to our political world. I know it happens on both sides but you cannot call a candidate Hitler and his supporters Nazis and White Nationalists and expect people to get along. The division is intentional.

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Not me. Too much collateral damage until these slow thinking, follow the leader sheep come to the same simple conclusions that prehistoric cavemen came to which were little boys & little girls have different strengths & weaknesses. Let the Libs die on the hill of fighting to keep the illegal Venezuela gang members who are rioting in Texas to be sent home to stay in the United States.

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I was a child in the 1960s. I grew up in LA. Part of my childhood memories are of large parts of the city burning down in massive riots.

TV news through the early 1970s was dominated, in my memory, by rioting in the USA and in Europe, the likes of which I have not seen again, stretching from about 1965 to 1972.

I was a precocious newspaper reader, from which I learned one group of legislators regularly called the other group commies or chicken-hawks (not terms of endearment).

About 80k Americans fled the USA for other countries because of the war. Leaving families who were often socially stigmatized because of it.

So, I am well acquainted with social divisions. I remember too old men back then saying that communists had taken control of the government. Or fascists. That the USA was a weakling and needed to be made strong again.

A wave of nostalgia overtook popular culture beginning in the mid-1970s as a large part of society claimed America was no longer great, and looked back to the 1940s as the apogee of American power.

You can hear it in the early music of Springsteen: jobs aren’t coming back, your hometown is finished. But what was missing was the white-hot outrage.

About every three generations the country tears itself apart and then reconstitutes itself. 1860-1870. 1917-1929. 1965-1978. We are in the process of it again.

The difference now is large parts of the electorate are addicted outrage to a degree it never has been before. And it refuses to even consider its addiction.

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Below is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Watch a bootleg copy of it if you can. Left, right, separatist, loyalist or those pretending to be impartial, there’s no good guys or bad guys, just everyone trying to make it through a reality that the world gave them. I can imagine those on the very far right could cherry pick things from the movie to promote their positions & those on the very far left doing the same. Best movie ever made to encourage Americans to be bi or tri lingual for worse case scenarios imo.

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I think we are seeing a new version of TDS among the MAGA supporters as the virus consumes their brains, Trans Derangement Syndrome.

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You’re doing it again. The GOP thanks you for falling in line!

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You probably wouldn’t be invited for a spin on Trump’s new toy, but here is a view of what it looks like on the inside:

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You’ve earned yourself a time out young man! Go to your corner and hush up.

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Oh sorry, did I break into you monologue?

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You broke in to the discussion by adding useless minutia and being counter productive. Airplane from Quatar bad. Got it.

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Did you know that in the US the Media Research Center just looked at statements and stories made by journalists, anchors, reporters and experts on the main networks in Trump’s first 100 days and found that 92 per cent were negative. By contrast, for Joe Biden’s first 100 days, 59 per cent were positive. These were the same people telling us Biden was at the top of his game and mentally fit as a fiddle right up until his disastrous debate.

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