Chairchucker

I posted a reply a little while back that is somewhat lengthier than this one is gonna be and the forum ate it so I gave up and did other things instead but I'm back and will try again I guess. My original post was primarily addressing your claim that you "base [your] views on politics around the policies of parties and outcomes", and I listed a number of outcomes. It's curious that you ignored all of that and went instead for my side comment about Trump's racism. Almost as if your claims that the things you cared most about were policies and outcomes, was a lie. The main point in that paragraph wasn't about Trump's racism in and of itself, but the flow on effects of that. The 'record numbers' spoken of by the article you posted were 17%, up from 8%. Obviously even 8% is still too high, but I guess black people are just as capable of voting against their own interests as white people are. The article does not even attempt to argue that Trump is not racist, it moreso lays out some of the reasons that he is, as a contrast to the point that black people seem to be voting for him anyway. The article's point is not, 'black people are voting for Trump, therefore how racist could he be?' It is more, 'black people are voting for Trump despite his racism.' The actual given reasons for this change is things like younger black voters not having the same attachment to civil rights legacy movements, or disillusionment with the Democratic party not treating black voters particularly well even despite the fact that it's been black voters who have consistently been more likely to vote Democrat. The article is more an indictment of the way the Democrats have taken the black vote for granted, than it is remotely vindicating Trump from being racist.

Did you even read this yourself? It doesn't support your position in the slightest.

Black people voting for Trump is not evidence against him being racist, any more than women voting against him is evidence against him being a rapist. (Which he is.)

Having read a number of your posts over the years, I've not found this to be true. You certainly subscribed to identity politics when it came to hand wringing over CRT, for example. I think the character of a leader matters, and can flow on to the rest of the population. White supremacist propaganda on college campuses tripled in 2017, for example. (https://www.adl.org/resources/report/white-supremacist-propaganda-surges-campus) There was also a 4% increase in the number of hate groups. (https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/02/21/year-hate-trump-buoyed-white-supremacists-2017-sparking-backlash-among-black-nationalist) and a 17% increase in hate crimes. (https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2017-hate-crime-statistics-released-111318) so it seems that, in fact, having an openly racist president is bad for the country as a whole. (Although he's said that he's probably the least racist person there is, so presumably you'll be taking him at his word rather than examining his words and actions.) Let's also look at some of the other outcomes. Trump added a few conservative justices to the supreme court which had the outcomes of rolling back Roe vs Wade and ruling that a president was literally above the law. Many prominent Republicans are science denying buffoons who think that climate change is a Democrat hoax, which has led to the Environmental Protection Agency being a bit of a joke. The Department of Agriculture were explicitly banned from using the word 'Climate Change.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails It seems that's a ban that a few Republicans have followed. Trump signed executive orders aimed at gutting obamacare, putting a ban on travel from a number of muslim majority countries, (but oddly not Saudi Arabia, a country with whom he did business) removing two regulations on businesses for every additional one that is added, (wtf, how would this even work?) limiting the separation of church and state by limiting the actions that can be taken against religious organisations engaged in political campaign activities, withdrawing federal protection for trans students, reducing the rights of federal employees, (including making them easier to fire) making it easier for oil and gas companies to lay pipelines, and scaling back environmental reviews when building highway, among other. Trump and the Republican party are very bad for women, people of colour, trans people, and the environment. EDIT: they're bad for everyone, but those are some of the 'highlights'

In a radical act of self care, I decided not to watch the debate unless one or both of the contestants literally died on stage. Apparently that didn't happen so I didn't watch the replay. Anyway, apparently Biden looked very silly, so of course Americans will do the sensible thing and elect a felonious rapist who packed the courts with conservative supreme court judges who rolled back Roe vs Wade and decided presidents were allowed to commit crimes if they did them 'officially'. I'm sure it's totally safe to assume the guy who said he'd be a dictator but only on day one, who labels any unflattering news story as 'fake news', who called those media outlets 'enemy of the American people', barred them from press conferences and suggested they lose their media license, who said that there were very fine people on both sides when one of the sides contained Nazis and Klan members and a white supremacist who killed someone with their car, who called athletes who protested against police brutality by kneeling 'sons of bitches' and suggested they be fired, suggested the USA accept more refugees from places like Norway or Asia rather than African nations, suggested it was treasonous not to applaud his speeches, used a school shooting as an opportunity to criticise the FBI for investigating himself, said it was great that China had a President for life and that maybe the USA should give that a shot some day, sided with Putin over the leaders of his own intelligence agencies, suggested that several congresswoman who happened to be women of colour, all of whom were American citizens and three of whom were born in the USA, should 'go back to their country', withheld pandemic aid from states with governors who 'weren't grateful enough', suggested that a 75 year old peace activist who was hospitalised after being shoved by police officers 'could be an ANTIFA provocateur', shared a video of a supporter yelling 'white power', said he might not accept the results of an election if he loses, suggested that a police officer accidentally killing someone is similar to a golfer missing a putt, encouraged people to vote twice, refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost an election, urged a crowd to march towards the capitol, told the crowd of domestic terrorists he'd just encouraged 'We love you. You're very special', tried to have the Vice President overturn the election... Well, I'm sure there's absolutely no downside to having that guy in power again.

Hello just a brief report from Australian politics. IYKYK

Gromnir you're on drugs and you should put them down. What I actually said: protesting is not censorship. What you somehow got out of that: violence is OK if I like the person doing it.

Hey I just quickly looked up the info and that appeared to be the response from the source I found. If they were assaulting people then, I guess the issue is not censorship but assault.

Removing the feelings each side have for each other from the context of why is ridiculous. If what you care about most in a conflict is the level of discourse, rather than the historical and current context, you're monumentally missing the point. Protests are not 'banning freedom of speech', nor are they censorship. They are exercises of the protesters' own free speech. It appears the 'violence' spoken of didn't happen until after the police went to try and disperse the protest, or as you might call it 'censor or ban their freedom of speech'. (Although that would in some ways be more accurate than the way you used it, since the police have got some kind of government connection going on.) In the counter example you offer, I might indeed be bothered by a pro-choice speaker being protested at a conservative university, but it wouldn't be because 'how dare you protest a speaker that's censorship', (it isn't censorship!) it would be because I disagree with their position, and think that the position they're taking is harmful. In much the same way that I was annoyed by antivaxx protesters because I think what they're doing is harmful. Oh cool let's talk about those things, too. Going to war over pronouns seems bad, people definitely shouldn't invade other sovereign nations over a linguistics issue. (lol I kid, just a light barb about your use of hyperbole.) But honestly, what do you mean by 'go to war'? For the most part I don't see a great deal of vitriol from the so-called 'woke' crowd about simple pronoun mistakes, more just a 'hey just so you know, this person prefers they/them pronouns' or whatever the case may be. I have definitely seen stronger criticism where it is clear that people are making a point of intentionally not using someone's preferred pronouns, which is honestly reasonable, because where there is intent, it is clear that someone is deliberately addressing someone else in a manner they don't want to be addressed, which seems somewhat disrespectful. BTW let's have an aside about trans people, because they're a somewhat likely candidate for preferring a different pronoun to what people might assume. A statistic that you might occasionally see regarding trans people is that amongst that section of the population, there is a relatively high percentage of people with depression, with suicidal thoughts, or who have attempted suicide. The statistic I just found from a quick internet search was something like 43% of people interviewed had attempted suicide. (This was in Australia.) Interestingly though, there were a few factors that were noted to reduce that statistic. Things like access to gender affirming surgery or hormones, social support from friends, family, co-workers etc, and lack of institutional discrimination. You know, things like just treating them like the gender they identify as, including using preferred pronouns. So, when people advocate for using others' preferred pronouns, one of the reasons is it's just better for their mental health, and at the risk of being DRAMATIC, is one of the many things that contributes towards making people less likely to try to kill themselves. To remove it from the context of trans people, I've known people who preferred to be known by their middle name, or by a certain version of their first name, and addressing them by the way they prefer, and making sure they're OK with what I'm calling them, is just common courtesy, and if I were to intentionally call them by a name or version of name that they didn't want to be called, that would be a jerk move. Now, I'm not as familiar with some of the discourse around safe spaces and trigger warnings. They're just a few of many things that I've seen held up as a straw man far more often than I've seen demands for either. Having said that, neither are really unreasonable things to exist. It's why content warnings exist in media in the first place. People want to know what they're getting into. If you take a victim of sexual assault to see a movie about sexual assault without warning them beforehand, that's kind of a jerk move, the same as if you take someone with conflict related PTSD into a movie with a lot of gunfire. It's a considerate move to 'warn' people that media might include one of their 'triggers', and no one should be mocked for doing this. Regarding Agatha Christie, as previously pointed out, this is not what censorship means. A publishing house electing to modify the content of their own works is just editing. It's always happened, it happened before when, for example, they edited Agatha Christie's book 'Ten Little (N-words)' (which also contained that word repeatedly throughout) to 'And Then There Were None,' or to 'Ten Little Indians.' The UK edition apparently didn't completely phase out the original title until 1985. I'm not sure whether that move received the same kind of performative, misguided outrage as the recent move. Probably more outrage than when they BRUTALLY CENSORED Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by calling it The Sorcerer's Stone in the USA. Edits happen for all kinds of reasons, but for some reason it's only the ones designed to remove slurs and stuff like that which receive performative outrage. (Although to be fair a lot of people did mock the USA for being perceived as not educated/smart enough to read a book called The Philosopher's Stone) I started writing this before I went to netball, so there's probs been some more responses by now, but I don't want to lose my progress so JUST PO

Oh sure, one side is trying to strip the rights from minorities and destroy the planet, but the other side engaged in some very uncivil discourse, so who's to say which side is worse?

And it might also be good to not uncritically 'both sides' a situation where one side is mocking the other for wanting LGBTQ people to be allowed to exist, I guess we could all do things differently ey?

No difference ey. Both sides ey. There may have been some hyperbole, but generally speaking in the current climate when people criticise others as being 'woke', it's because they are doing things like calling out systemic injustice, pointing out that climate change exists, (this one's weird, acknowledgement of a scientific consensus shouldn't have a use in a pejorative that seems to be trying to criticise people for caring about people's feelings or whatever) suggesting that trans people should be allowed to exist, that sort of thing, so frankly no, they're not the same thing, and you've applied zero critical thought to this conclusion.

I don't go around calling myself a 'libtard', but I still know to disregard the opinions of people who use that as a pejorative, too.

People vote for her because she hurts the people they've been told to hate. EDIT: Great example in that clip of how people who use 'woke' as a pejorative are worthless and should be ignored.

Hmmm, it seeeeems like Ezra might be a terrible person, so I might skip that one.

Saw Polite Society, it was excellent, goes very hard. Fun action, pretty funny, escalates in an entertaining way.

Florida should love Dame Edna, Barry Humphries called being trans a 'fashion', and called people who sought gender reaffirming surgery 'mutilated men'.

A largely correct stance tbh. Bud light did a partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. Dylan Mulvaney is trans. Conservatives got mad and performatively destroyed a bunch of Bud Light, declaring they would instead switch to Coors Light, a brand that has been supporting LGBT causes for years, or any number of other beers that are owned by the same company that owns Bud Light.

Firstly, yes, put all the politicians in prison. I think some of the reasons the USA went in to bat for the ghost of Khashoggi a bit harder than for any number of other atrocity victims is that: a. A lot of victims of atrocities are 'just' being exploited to an extra degree, and the USA is broadly ok with exploiting workers, whereas Khashoggi was actively murdered b. They might want to set a precedent that it's not OK to silence journalists.

Not sure you do, TBH. I think murderers should be held accountable.

Yeah I'm sure there's a bunch of atrocities it would be politically expedient to ignore. I guess at some point, some governments have decided that there's a moral duty not to.

Newest episode of the Mandalorian was very silly. I enjoyed it, but it was silly. And weird.

Yeah, but there's a naive part of me that hopes the GOP will be able to avoid having him as the candidate of choice if he's in prison, or that he'll be so busy being in prison he'll forget to run or something.

I still do not believe in the possibility of A Legal Consequence for Trump and will not do so until he is in prison, but on the offchance I am wrong and Stormy ends up being the equivalent of Al Capone's accountant (this is a bad analogy but stick with me here) she should be considered a national hero imo. (Only slight hyperbole) Anyway, Trump definitely deserves prison several times over, and if it turns out to be the equivalent of tax evasion that does him in I'm all for it, but that probs won't happen and we'll probs have to choose between two geriatrics at voting time again, oh well.

I watched the new Dungeons and Dragons movie and thought it was excellent. Feels like it did a good job of pandering to hardcore fans while not alienating newcomers, too.