2020 Election Commentary

[jhkim]

There's isn't anyone on the left here who is close to the prolificness and extreme language of SHARK's rants...

Elfdart start more recently, but is doing their damnedest to catch up. And SHARK is quite reasonable most of the time, it's just this election seems to bring out the cheerleaders. On that topic more than any other, the tone has changed from debate to team rallying cries.

Elfdart has had like 6 posts after 6 months of silence. Even if that weren't true, there are a lot more posters like SHARK than there are like Elfdart. And there were even fewer left-wing posters prior to the election results, it seems to me. But if Elfdart continues, I'll try to respond.

You periodically throw Conservatives a bone by occasional agreement, or defense, as the case may be--but your critiques against Left wingers is, to be honest, seems awfully tepid.

You know that's right!

I'm not claiming to be centrist. I'm a liberal. However, I am making an effort to say what I actually believe, and be willing to disagree with both liberals and conservatives to the extent that they disagree with that. I have some non-standard liberal positions, like being pro-nuclear-power, anti-organic, anti-affirmative-action, and anti-rent-control. I think we may have irreconcilable differences over moral and ethical principles, but I think we should at least be able to discuss and possibly even agree about what objective reality is.

As far as the topic goes -- from what I can tell, Elfdart's position is that there is election fraud but (a) it's not extensive, and (b) it's more from Republicans than Democrats. I don't agree with him in that I don't see clear evidence, but I don't think his position is anywhere near the extreme of RandyB's position that there were over 45 million fraudulent votes for Biden. I think the latter is just wacko. Regardless of politics, it's just not believable.

[consolcwby]

Am I considered right-wing because I first talked about the electoral college, or that the voters do NOT directly vote for a candidate? Why is it that everyone on the left is on auto-detect and a subversive all of a sudden. I mean, being accused of being a child or a simpleton, or of never having voted before just because I do NOT agree with the hive mind or the fud IS NOT THE DEFINITION OF LIBERAL. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/liberal
I AM liberal. I AM tolerant. And I keep warning people of what may come down the pike. Even those who are INTOLERANT and INSOLENT to the lawful process. Which is why I am committed to dumping INTERESTING and RE SEARCHABLE information. Unbelievable how some people are so WANTING a fight, that they call for innocent blood. I have been called dramatic: Somewhat true, somewhat false. I have my reasons for posting the way I post - I want someone to KNOW I don't give an inch on my experiences. Not a MILLimeter!

[HappyDaze]

Unbelievable how some people are so WANTING a fight, that they call for innocent blood.

Around these parts, don't waste your action on trying to disbelieve; what you're seeing is not an illusion.

[oggsmash]

  Norway sure looks pretty in shows like Lillyhammer and Ragnorak.   

[SHARK]

  Norway sure looks pretty in shows like Lillyhammer and Ragnorak.

Greetings!

Lillyhammer and Ragnorak? What are those shows like, Ogg?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

[oggsmash]

Lillyhammer is about an american gangster who gets witness relocated to Norway (no way in hell I see that happening) and the resulting culture clash is hilarious.   Ragnorak was a show on Netflix that though it has a bit of a green tinge with anti corporatism (to be honest I have about had it with multinational corps more so than the most rabid SJW) and more subtitled teen love angle than I normally care for, it entertained me quite a bit.  (basically the huge multinational corporation is run by frost giants who survived ragnorak, and are dismayed to find out one of the Aesir may have been reborn in town, and since he can toss a hammer a mile, they are worried).

[Pat]

Am I considered right-wing because I first talked about the electoral college, or that the voters do NOT directly vote for a candidate? Why is it that everyone on the left is on auto-detect and a subversive all of a sudden.

If you say literally anything someone doesn't like, odds are very good they'll immediately label you as the Enemy, and start claiming you believe all kinds of things they've assigned to their Enemy. You don't even have to say something political; pointing out a grammatical error is enough.

This has always been true to some degree, but a decade or more ago you could simply correct them, and they'd accept that. They might even be curious about what you believe, because it defies the pattern. But that's no longer true. And it's not just they've become incurious about different points of view, it's that they can't even accept that alternative perspectives exist. Once you're labeled the Enemy, it doesn't matter what you say. You can protest all you want, but they'll never believe you. They're the experts in what you believe, not you.

[consolcwby]

Some interesting stuff I saw today:
===================================
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-men-charged-voter-fraud-after-allegedly-submitting-thousands-applications
https://twitter.com/almostjingo/status/1328510478801256449
https://twitter.com/DarnelSugarfoo/status/1328634843387760642
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1328176062522683393
https://twitter.com/NBCNightlyNews/status/1328730895667302400
https://twitter.com/themarketswork/status/1328508225818296320
https://twitter.com/themarketswork/status/1328508437718732801
https://twitter.com/themarketswork/status/1328509258959179777/photo/1
https://twitter.com/derf_anon/status/1328511268593004545
https://twitter.com/JennaEllisEsq/status/1328553131005931521
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/17/ted-cruz-slams-jack-dorsey-for-twitter-warnings-slapped-on-tweets-about-voter-fraud/
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1328562788323762177
https://v1.nitrocdn.com/PtUefQrfncdsWOjilqcqdvGyQbUvpoWC/assets/static/source/rev-31fc39d/wp-content/uploads/blumenthal-1-1-600x450.jpg
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/sen-blumenthal-urges-mark-zuckerberg-remove-breitbart-gateway-pundit-donald-trump-jr-eric-trump-steve-bannon-facebook/
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/11/twitter-uprising-demands-that-trump-finally-get-kicked-off-the-platform/

According to the US Constitution, if the vote goes to Congress: House of Reps is voting for President. 1 VOTE PER STATE - 37 Repub. States ... Senate votes for Vice Pres. Thought - If House flips and were to vote for Biden, then Pence would be VP.... However, Repubs would have to do more than JUST a few flips. An interesting thought-experiment of combinations, eh?

===================================

And finally, this:
"DEATH to FASCISM AND the LIBERALISM THAT ENABLES IT."
https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1324167660704198657

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai E. Stevenson
"Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice." ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Guess this old dead WHITE DEMOCRAT is canceled now?... I guess being a true liberal (as in liberty - NOT LIBERTINE)
is alt-right now. No longer just McCarthyism? (OR DO I NEED EVIDENCE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism )

Am I considered right-wing because I first talked about the electoral college, or that the voters do NOT directly vote for a candidate? Why is it that everyone on the left is on auto-detect and a subversive all of a sudden.

@Pat
--snip---
They're the experts in what you believe, not you.

They are also the ones who think I'm avoiding life. Strategic Retreat for the time being...

[Elfdart]

Well, Nicholas Maduro is a Dictator, and one of the worst. Typical Old World 'Strongman". He was legitimately elected using voting machines designed by a CIA backed company to finagle the vote. And let's just take a close look at those national elections in Venezuela, shall we?

So you're saying the CIA helped elect Maduro, even though the CIA has been trying to remove him (and Chavez before him) for twenty years? Have you tried changing out your bongwater?

Whenever your President has barred members of the opposition from having an opportunity to be elected, forced them into exile (...becuase they are afraid of being assassinated), or otherwise placed them under house arrest  you can be 100% certain said President is a De Facto Banana Republic Dictator.

By this standard, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were dictators because they locked up people who led armed revolts that included attempts to overthrow, kidnap and assassinate duly elected officials. Lincoln and Johnson even had some of them hanged. Members of Congress who backed the Confederacy were expelled from office and barred from ever holding a position of public trust again. They also exiled rebel fifth-columnists.

Want a more recent example? You can slam Clinton and Bush Jr for many things, but anyone claiming they were tyrants because they imprisoned Terry Nichols for life and executed Timothy McVeigh is at best a moron.

Nicholas Maduro made his business fortune from Drug Trafficking, and there is an oustanding arrest warrant for him, and fifteen million dollar bounty for his capture on his head.

William Barr has a real soft spot for fascist thugs who want to carry out a putsch against duly elected leaders. He testified before Congress that he saw nothing wrong with a baying mob of hooligans brandishing guns and threatening the governor of Michigan. A few weeks later, several of these Blackshirts were arrested when they were caught trying to kidnap and assassinate the governor -clearly they got the message he wanted to send. And after offering a $15 million dollar bounty for the abduction/assassination of Maduro, lo and behold another merry band of thugs were arrested by fish and wildlife officers when they tried to collect the prize in a murder-for-hire scheme. So any accusations of criminal behavior from Trump's AG are little more than an attempt to justify murder -like John Hinckley's letters to Jodie Foster.

Were I a betting man, I'd wager that William Barr is more likely to end up behind bars than Maduro.

There is your hero, Elfdart, right there.

Were you born this stupid or did your parents drop-kick you head first down a flight of stairs?

Whatever Maduro's faults or crimes might be, they aren't a drop in the bucket compared to what US-backed regimes have in store for anyone so unfortunate as to be forced to live under them. The genocide in Guatemala after the elected Arbenz was overthrown (they're still uncovering mass graves down there) should make anyone think twice when the CIA supports their latest Quisling. Remember last fall when Evo Morales was dubbed a tyrant for winning an election fair and square? I do: a fascist coup was carried out and he was forced to flee for his life. The first act of the putsch regime was to give preemptive amnesty to soldiers and paramilitaries who machine-gunned civilians -which they did.


(Feel free to say I'm being unfair in calling these people fascists.)

Now Morales is back and Uncle Sam's name is mud in that country for at least a generation. His name is mud in Venezuela, too thanks to the coup attempts against Chavez in 2002 and more recently, Maduro -and that doesn't even take into account that the intended replacement's followers are the kind of thugs who firebomb maternity wards and burn black people alive, like Orlando Figueroa, who was lynched by Maduro's "opposition".

[Ghostmaker]

Right now I can pull another dozen names -- and these aren't just Twatter nobodies, these are public figures with blue checkmarks who in some cases hold or have held public office -- who happily discuss how much they want to punish anyone who didn't want to vote for Joe Biden or for that matter, Hillary Clinton. This is the state of politics today in the U.S.

STOP FUCKING TELLING ME I'M IMAGINING IT.

Fuck this, I tried.

I never told you you imagined anything, BTW. I said you took a lot of things, combined them, and then attacked other people as if they were that thing.

And yet you still don't HEAR a damn thing I say. But that's par for the course.

[Ghostmaker]

If you want to know the answer: "Overall, we rate The Buffalo Chronicle Questionable based on far-right-wing bias, a complete lack of transparency, promotion of propaganda/conspiracy theories, and several failed fact checks." https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-buffalo-chronicle/

Aww, you trotted out Dave Van Zandt's pet website!

I guess he recovered from getting hit with that C&D order, though. Snort.

[Pat]

Right now I can pull another dozen names -- and these aren't just Twatter nobodies, these are public figures with blue checkmarks who in some cases hold or have held public office -- who happily discuss how much they want to punish anyone who didn't want to vote for Joe Biden or for that matter, Hillary Clinton. This is the state of politics today in the U.S.

STOP FUCKING TELLING ME I'M IMAGINING IT.

Fuck this, I tried.

I never told you you imagined anything, BTW. I said you took a lot of things, combined them, and then attacked other people as if they were that thing.

And yet you still don't HEAR a damn thing I say. But that's par for the course.

You're imagining it.

[Elfdart]

In any event, it's hard to take seriously an article that refers to the late Hugo Chavez as a "dictator" when he was legitimately elected and made it a point not to crush his enemies -even after they tried at least one putsch against him.

That's not a very good argument. Hitler, of all people, rose to power in a legitimate election. Plenty of dictators use democratic means to acquire power; the defining characteristic is how they change rules or use extralegal means to ensure they stay in power. And Chavez not only changed the Constitution and packed the courts to maintain his hold, he even started his career as part of a failed military coup. Venezuela never became fully authoritarian under his rule, but it was on the border.

That's a slippery way of wording it. Hitler was trounced in the 1932 presidential election by Hindenburg, but got the chancellorship in a corrupt bargain when the German establishment (landowners, bankers, industrialists, etc) decided to back him and put him over. So no, Hitler was never elected. He got the job in a backroom deal.

[consolcwby]

In any event, it's hard to take seriously an article that refers to the late Hugo Chavez as a "dictator" when he was legitimately elected and made it a point not to crush his enemies -even after they tried at least one putsch against him.

That's not a very good argument. Hitler, of all people, rose to power in a legitimate election. Plenty of dictators use democratic means to acquire power; the defining characteristic is how they change rules or use extralegal means to ensure they stay in power. And Chavez not only changed the Constitution and packed the courts to maintain his hold, he even started his career as part of a failed military coup. Venezuela never became fully authoritarian under his rule, but it was on the border.

That's a slippery way of wording it. Hitler was trounced in the 1932 presidential election by Hindenburg, but got the chancellorship in a corrupt bargain when the German establishment (landowners, bankers, industrialists, etc) decided to back him and put him over. So no, Hitler was never elected. He got the job in a backroom deal.

Hmm... You sure know alot about NAZIS. Are they part of your interests? Conflict Simulations? Just wondering...

[rawma]

I pushed back correcting rawma when he claimed that Veritas hadn't posted their video.

To be more accurate, I said no recording on the page linked to, since I could only find there the claim that it existed, and I joked that it was a rickroll failure. I acknowledged your providing links but neither link you gave appears to be on the page that was linked to. If Brad wants to put forward some evidence, he should link to the evidence, not to some conservative website that simply asserts that the evidence exists. You are generally even-handed (if it seems not so to conservatives, it's because reality has a well known liberal bias) but you shouldn't misrepresent what I said to boost your both-sides credentials.

I'm still not gonna waste two hours on anything edited by Project Veritas. But the link below suggests that the recording doesn't add anything to the story prior to that, but adds that the total of "late arriving but postmarked by Nov 3rd" ballots in Pennsylvania were only around 10,000 (not enough to swing the state; I don't even know if they were even counted yet). Further, Erie had only 129 such and the whistleblower's facility had only 2 of these.

https://factcheck.thedispatch.com/p/did-a-postal-worker-witness-ballot

EDITED TO ADD: jhkim, care to acknowledge my correction of you? https://www.therpgsite.com/the-rpgpundit-s-own-forum/2020-election-commentary/msg1151983/?topicseen#msg1151983