Today's Assault on Constitutional Democracy Gamethread

[BSUTOP25]

11 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

I may be going somewhere even darker... that we all have dark impulses, including good people. That a person can be good and still have voted for trump because they get annoyed by pressing two for english. That you can have impulses or thoughts that people consider racist and still have a place in society. The point is to give people the opportunity to try and moderate those darkest impulses, judge them more by actions than by their impulses, and offer them positive reinforcement collectively when their actions call for it. We must accept this, or real pluralism will be dead.

Yeah, I agree with you to a certain extent. It's similar to bad fleeting thoughts men have about women. Some are able to control and push those thoughts away while others can't or simply don't. I've also agreed with the push 2 for English haters being not only obtuse but short sighted as Hispanics could have been the most opportunistic minority for the Republicans to bring into their tent ... but the "this is Murica and so speak Murican" crowd won the day there. Was that 100% racism or was some of it nationalism? Or does that even matter? In the end, chalk most of it up to plain ignorance ... and the rest up to bigotry. 

[halfmanhalfbronco]

20 minutes ago, East Coast Aztec said:

Hence why they they shouldn't be viewed as BLM riots.  It's scapegoating.  No different than if someone tagged MAGA on something during an event that had no correlation.  Such as the Columbus statue.  Like BLM was going hard for Columbus in Oregon.

Agreed, it was lazy to lump them in with the Floyd protests even if that is how they started.

 

[818SUDSFan]

1 hour ago, FresnoFacts said:

So not only is there photo evidence of participants but there is also DNA evidence.

The typical Trump supporter isn't exactly known for being a rocket scientist.

[toonkee]

1 hour ago, thelawlorfaithful said:

I have been paying very close attention. All year, I haven’t had to backpedal or moderate my views. I’m glad people are coming around but don’t bs me with things I see with my own eyes, I’m not gonna be gaslit. Capitol police did everything police did to break up riots. They were outmanned, outgunned, and retreated when they had to in order to save the United States legislature.

Were they unprepared, not having the full force available? Yeah! But that doesn’t make them complicit. They didn’t know, just like everyone else was surprised, that a Trump rally turned violent. You can prepare for things when you know ahead of time that past history shows that violent riots are likely. No police department in the world prepares for a riot when a crowd that hasn’t shown the propensity for rioting gathers. It’s not on the Capitol police. It’s on those dirt bags that surprise attacked our legislature and the pos in charge that instead of protecting our government, was inciting the mob.

It's was obvious there were many police that were doing all they could to stem the tide. 

Some of the actions seen were not as easily understood from my armchair, however. They may have logical explanations, and that's what I'm leaning toward, but hell if I know for sure, and with all due respect I'm not convinced you can know that either at this time.

We should be careful when assuming all the cops and their leadership, including the civilian leadership, acted completely appropriately and with the unified sincerity and motivations.

[sactowndog]

12 minutes ago, NVGiant said:

This kind of behavior is ugly. But in his case, the chickens are coming home to roost. 

The problem is these people strung the false claims for so long they now can’t walk back to the truth.  When you humor falsities for 4 years it bites you in the ass. 

[toonkee]

This is gold, Jerry.

 

 

[sean327]

6 minutes ago, 818SUDSFan said:

The typical Trump supporter isn't exactly known for being a rocket scientist.

I beg to differ. Many of my engineer friends are Trump supporters. There are very smart people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid. I don’t think intelligence has anything to do with it.

[TheSanDiegan]

14 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

I was looking more at the idea of nature healing itself. There's been a pretty strong turn in ecological thought away from those kinds of systems seeking some predictable point of equilibrium to those systems being more defined by complexity and dynamism. Also speaking to the fact that nature is a social construct, so "nature" is defined at times over history as that which man does not control. Thus nature = chaos.

 

I'm afraid your philosophy just cannibalized your physics. No length of semantic elasticity can or will undermine the fallacy that there is abundant empirical evidence speaking to nature's trend towards complexity all over the known universe. 

[sactowndog]

22 minutes ago, FresnoFacts said:

"My Kevin".....

 

We are divided because this POS didn’t stand up and tell people the truth.   

[toonkee]

19 minutes ago, NVGiant said:

This kind of behavior is ugly. But in his case, the chickens are coming home to roost. 

In the end everyone will be called a leftist and a traitor. No one will escape this. Those who court it and attempt to wrangle it are fools.

[818SUDSFan]

1 minute ago, sean327 said:

I beg to differ. Many of my engineer friends are Trump supporters. There are very smart people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid. I don’t think intelligence has anything to do with it.

I didn't say I think all Trumpists are stupid and I'm sure many are highly intelligent. However, as the Trump administration has progressed, I've seen less and less evidence of them at rallies with a growing percentage of the crowd rocking QAnon gear and racist shit.

[toonkee]

19 minutes ago, smltwnrckr said:

I was looking more at the idea of nature healing itself. There's been a pretty strong turn in ecological thought away from those kinds of systems seeking some predictable point of equilibrium to those systems being more defined by complexity and dynamism. Also speaking to the fact that nature is a social construct, so "nature" is defined at times over history as that which man does not control. Thus nature = chaos.

 

 

3 minutes ago, TheSanDiegan said:

I'm afraid your philosophy just cannibalized your physics. No length of semantic elasticity can or will undermine the fallacy that there is abundant empirical evidence speaking to nature's trend towards complexity all over the known universe. 

[BSUTOP25]

Just now, sean327 said:

I beg to differ. Many of my engineer friends are Trump supporters. There are very smart people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid. I don’t think intelligence has anything to do with it.

In some cases it does as I'd guess the average IQ of those who broke into the Capitol was <100. But I agree, there are a lot of intelligent people who voted for Trump, including my cousin who is a scientist involved in the ongoing cleanup effort at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. She's also not a racist. 

[FresnoFacts]

Derrick Evans is a 35 year old just sworn in as a GOP member of WV's House of Delegates. WV's Republican Governor has called for his resignation.

Evans posted then deleted videos of himself inside the Capitol on Wednesday.

In the arrest video, his grandmother says her grandson is a "fine man". She also says "Thank you Mr. Trump for inviting him to a riot at the White House."

 

 

[818SUDSFan]

3 minutes ago, sactowndog said:

We are divided because this POS didn’t stand up and tell people the truth.   

He and Nunes are a disgrace to California's Central Valley. Both are vastly different from my mother's family in Idaho in being more akin to rich agribusiness interests than the small farm Mom grew up on.

[sebasour]

44 minutes ago, BSUTOP25 said:

We’re not arguing that racists didn’t jump to vote for Trump because they found his rhetoric to be in line with their warped bigoted views. What we’re trying to say is that not all of the 70 million or so who voted for Trump are racist, nor should they automatically be labeled as such. When that labeling and lumping in happens, you end up disenfranchising a lot of people who just stop listening to valid points you may have about the idiot they’re voting for.

 

Maybe, but Id argue the bulk of them are. 

 

I'm not sure if it's 10% or 25% of Trump voters who are only willing to tolerate racism and not outwardly racist themselves. Either way its not a good sign of the state of this country.

 

My question is, how disgusting can a politician be, before you start questioning the character of their supporters?

[smltwnrckr]

3 minutes ago, TheSanDiegan said:

I'm afraid your philosophy just cannibalized your physics. No length of semantic elasticity can or will undermine the fallacy that there is abundant empirical evidence speaking to nature's trend towards complexity all over the known universe. 

What are you talking about? I think you're conflating my personal and fleeting musings in the past about little green men and my statement about the history of ecological thought. I didn't say there's not math showing the universe trends toward the more complex.

People who studied forests and streams and all that good stuff used to think ecosystems sought a particular, predictable state of balance. People now think that it's more complicated than that, or at least a lot of them do. That isn't irreconcilable with the fact, not philosophy, that "nature" is social construct. If anything, it helps to reinforce it.  

[smltwnrckr]

3 minutes ago, 818SUDSFan said:

He and Nunes are a disgrace to California's Central Valley. Both are vastly different from my mother's family in Idaho in being more akin to rich agribusiness interests than the small farm Mom grew up on.

East side of the valley has more of a history and culture of smaller farms. Those Westside land barons have been ruining everyone's shit for generations!

[BSUTOP25]

6 minutes ago, sebasour said:

 

Maybe, but Id argue the bulk of them are. 

 

I'm not sure if it's 10% or 25% of Trump voters who are only willing to tolerate racism and not outwardly racist themselves. Either way its not a good sign of the state of this country.

 

My question is, how disgusting can a politician be, before you start questioning the character of their supporters?

These are valid questions and I don’t know if there is a quantifiable way to answer them. My simple hope is that there are a lot of @bornonthebluetype of Republicans out there who have seen enough and want their party to purge itself of that cancer.

[halfmanhalfbronco]

13 minutes ago, sean327 said:

I beg to differ. Many of my engineer friends are Trump supporters. There are very smart people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid. I don’t think intelligence has anything to do with it.

My former step father is a civil engineer and project leader for CH2MHill, I still meet up with him.  He has bought it all.  My aunt was the former president of the State Board of Medicine.  Her too.  They probably have a combined IQ of 290.  My grandmother (granted not the mental giant now at 87 she used to be) has a doctorate and has published several books on marriage, divorce and child rearing ("funny" story, she locked herself in her room for 3 years when my dad and uncle were growing up, go figure) and has bought it.  Members of my church who pull down 7 figures a year have bought it.  

Lot's of smart people join cults.