smjjames

Shouldn't Protestants and Islam also be lumped in there? Catholics and Judaism don't have a monopoly on that kind of thing in organized religion.

I think I recall that it was more or less homogenous across the US, or at least I don't remember anything mentioned about any particular states or anything that jumped out as an outlier. While one could get a rough estimate of the demographics by doing some math, it's harder to get accurate demographics because you can't directly ask them as one would with entry/exit polls.

The thing is that Congress has been unable to make a major deal and reform on their own for immigration for like, the past 20 years now. Every time they get close to any sort of comprehensive deal, conservative scream AMNESTY!!11!1!!1 and scuttle the whole thing. DACA, whether you support it or not, was an attempt at fixing part of it, but that’s not the same thing as something comprehensive and holistic coming out of Congress.

Is there a BBC code view or something? Would be nice to be able to easily split up quotes. Not sure what you mean by 'it should be', like it should be surprising? If you take it logically, yeah, I can see how you'd say it's surprising, since on the face of it, it makes no sense. However, the guy working at the local mill who is voting Trump isn't neccesarily using logic here. The main thing that is surprising though is that he doesn't have a higher job rating despite a good economy, and yeah, it's quite ironic how the impacts of much of what Trump did has actually negatively hit his base. The answer is found in how Trump presented himself, as an outsider who would 'smash the establishment to pieces and drain the swamp'. It's not the entire story, obviously, since he didn't create the conditions which enabled his Presidency and instead tapped into the existing mood. If the Democrats can't figure out how to understand that disaffected voter bloc, then Trump will definetly win a second term. There will be portions that would never vote Democrat ever in a quadrillion trillion years, but theres a reason why those people are disaffected.

Late reply: I still wanted to rebut at Gromnir, but I agree that going further on that line is going to go nowhere, so, I'll agree to disagree with Gromnir on that partricular line/dispute and leave it at that.

I'll admit that I was being subtle, maybe too subtle, and you're the one who decided to be obsfucative rather than answer the question more directly. Also, as I said earlier, you know sharp_one a heck of a lot better than I do and would pick up on the similarities more easily than I could, which is why I kept missing your subtle signals. So, is it my fault that I missed things that were all too obvious to you? no. I agree however that this got more attention than it deserves. He's said before (or at least implied and other sources have said and/or implied as well) that he uses the same tactics in Real Estate, so, it's no surprise that he's using said tactics that appear to have worked so well for him there. There may also be a bit of Nixon's 'Madman doctrine' in there (as I've heard mentioned before as being part of the so called 11D chess strategy), but Nixon was politically savvy where Trump isn't. Whether the strategy and tactic is truly effective in Real Estate, I have no idea, but it's definetly hurting the US's reputation and credibility and all around making enemies and allies alike go 'WTF are they doing?'. If the strategy/tactic was done by someone who has the political competence and everything that Trump doesn't have, it could play out differently.

True on that, and all I'm saying is that if we (well, gromnir at least) are going to be all conspiritorational about it to the point that it ends up with missed signals at me, then we should get this over with. No idea if I'm the only one who missed all the signals initially though or what, injurais comment seemed more of an offhand reference to the sig pic than any kind of signalling,

I did come to the conclusion that gromnir thinks or maybe thinks that skarpen is somehow sharp_one, but I didn't want to straight out conspiritorationally call him out on it, hence the 'what does skarpen have to do with sharp_one', then gromnir proceeded to be obsfucative. In that case, wouldn't the mods be able to tell via IP or whatever that skarpen is indeed sharp_one. The thing is that skarpen, while he is also Polish and is a patriot and loves hussars, he doesn't sound a whole lot like sharp_one, (whch goes a ways towards explaining me being oblivious to what gromnir was saying), thus I wasn't exactly convinced. Of course, gromnir has been around this community a hell of a lot longer than I have and would know sharp_one way better, and so, may have picked up some cues that I didn't. EITHER WAY, maybe it's time we stopped being all conspiritorational and ask the mods to actually confirm whether skarpen really is sharp_one?

You've gone from not clear to negative because I'm even more confused because you're both telling me to use 'sharp' in a mocking context while at the same time you're referring to skarpen as 'sharp', does that mean you're constantly mocking him by calling him 'sharp'?

What does Skarpen have to do with Sharp_One? I thought you were calling him 'sharp' because injurai commented on skarpens sig pic than insinuating something.

Trump is certainly fearmongering, but I'm not so sure about the channeling power part. He's certainly channeling power insofar as he actually has said power, but it's one thing to channel such power competently and another to thrash it around in unproductive ways.

Eh, I wouldn't compare Trump to Baron Harkonnen, nowhere near the level of sadism that Baron Harkonnen and his clan exhibited in the books. Trump is barely even using the tools of statecraft, he's just repeatedly using the same increasingly failed method. Good PR for who? Not Trump......

And of course, it's just the latest in a long line of using the same tactic. This is the other danger with constantly doing bluffs and then not acting on them is that nobody is going to take you seriously, then what happens when you do something bluff-like and nobody is taking that seriously? Really though, by all appearances, Trump threw a tantrum and economic uncertianity+chaos for no reason at all.

So, basically Trump tried to save himself from shooting himself in the face and shot himself in the foot instead? Though really, I don't think he has metaphorical legs left to shoot himself in since he does it so much. FYI, not everybody here voted Trump It's no surprise that he treats them like real estate deals and thinks he can threaten and/or pull out of them without consequence. As for NAFTA 2.0, last I heard, Pelosi was waiting on Mexico to fulfill their part of the deal with new labor laws, which they are still in progress of doing. So, even without this whole tariff BS, it's not 100% guaranteed to pass.

That assumes the log flume ride has an ending. Anyways, stopping Trump from using it as a threat in the way he does is a different thing than stopping him from implementing it and the tariffs have been indefinetly suspended since a deal of some kind has been reached with Mexico, details haven't been revealed yet.

'Hard' doesn't neccesarily equal 'heavy', a nut is hard but it's not heavy.

It could even be the death knell for NAFTA 2.0

It could be one of those ‘trial balloons’ that get whipped out every so often, but he’s obviously doing it to get around Congress, even using a law which has been used plenty of time in the past, but looking at Wikipedia, none of them have been for immigration related stuff. TBH, the whole Mexico tariffs and the fact that they are supposed to increase each month makes them sound far more like blackmail/extortion than any kind of economic reasoning.

Yeah, the thing is that some of the things said about them were based on rumors or were criticisms of things, plus the fact for Caligula, there are few surviving accounts and even those accounts tend to be biased in some way or other. You really have the difference between someone whose madness seems to have been quite real and could give even Trump pause and someone whose main mistake, ignoring the rampant rumors of what he was doing in his island getaway, was choosing someone to rule in his stead that turned out to be corrupt and ended up plotting against him.

Trump is a LOT closer to Tiberius than Caligula, minus the fact that Tiberius didn't even want to be emperor. And really, had Caligula not flamed out so quickly, he could have turned out to be just as bad, or even worse than Tiberius.

Uh, nobody said that the monarch needed to be muslim?..... We're talking about politicians here, not the monarchy. As for the whole starting each day with a christian prayer, that's something Parliament is going to have to figure out as far as muslim politicians.

That'd be the ideal, yes, but when it comes to tribalism and large groups, it's not always the case.

Why do you think they don't?

At least the freedom fries thing wasn't part of some official policy making.... Looks like this one was from Rick Perry making a joke or something and then other people taking it way more seriously than it should have been. We all know how much Trump hates McCain, but this is really taking it to the next level.... (The Guardian liveblog entry) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/may/29/trump-news-today-live-roy-moore-alabama-mueller-democrats-2020-latest-updates?page=with:block-5cef1bae8f08ad67f1a83a37#block-5cef1bae8f08ad67f1a83a37 the WH is making sure that a ship with the name USS John McCain (which could be named after his dad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._McCain_Jr.) out of sight when Trump visited Japan. I'd have straight up said no to that because it's as BS as it sounds like.

The fact that our elections are so decentralized is likely the reason why they didn't try to go that route and do the much easier route of simply sowing chaos over social media. That isn't vote tampering in the strictest definition, but it's still meddling. There are also reports of two Florida counties getting hacked (the extent wasn't revealed though), but Florida is already messy enough without someone trying to hack into elections there. As for the FBI being non-political, yeah, they're supposed to be, but kind of difficult to avoid looking political when they got the Clinton investigation thrusted on them, and in the middle of an election no less. Comey did screw things up by deviating from the protocol and I've read articles saying that if he had stuck to protocol, whatever the political backlash may have been, he'd have been in less trouble than he was. The reason the FBI is in a mess is because it got forced into politics. What (well, the way they were doing it anyway, not gonna get into conspiracy theories) Strzok and Paige did was also dumb (the using the work phones to hide their relationship aside) and it's reasonable to wonder where the oversight was on that. I've never heard of the specific term Crossfire Hurricane, but I get the visual.