Harry Marks wrote:
And there it is - people who have been charged with maintaining the mechanisms of democracy have gone so far into tribalism that they are threatening democracy itself. God help us.

The scariest thing is we still have 61 days left in Donald Trump's presidency, and the President seems bent on a scorched earth policy in an attempt to sabotage Biden's presidency. This is not putting party before country. It's putting ego before country. I keep hoping Republicans will finally make a stand, but we're running out of time. Damage is being done. More than half of Republicans actually believe the election was stolen from Trump. God help us indeed.

: Uncle Taylor is here, I’m here to reassure you!. Too rescue you .

Read the following as stream of consciousness:

I have become attuned to the sound of spraying water.
In the actual middle of posting to this thread..there it is .. the sound of spaying water!

This past summer I had to replumb my entire house. 2 copper pipes below the slab corroded. No place to go but up.. ease, finances, logic determines things to be so. This year I had a pipe break. I was woke by the sound/song of water spraying.. I was confused..What the hell is going on? ..as soon as my feet hit the floor.. I knew..My house was flooding.. Panic at 5:30 am.

It’s an eternity between realization of the specific source of the gusher and getting your hands on the water main. Instantaneous amounts of a myriad of thoughts figuratively floods the mind as the house is literally flooding.

I dealt with it. I pushed two inches of water from my house, it took about 3 hours, it took a couple more days too dry things out. For me it was a disaster.. all financed from my pocket.

To Be Clear: Donald J. Trump has got.. it seems to me.. the equivalent of Shit.. for Brains.

We are suffering trough this idea of tribal influences, (the concept of tribalism is entirely lost by those who are in fact the subjects of the descriptor) of distrust of Mainstream Media, ( as though a preponderance of Americans actually listen to, read or watch in anything resembling do diligence any media, to warrant a distrust) an almost impossible to imagine lack of understanding of the history of not just America but world history, There is zero understanding by too many people of the evolution of not just geology but biology, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy,physics, politics, economics, law, constitutions, migration, integration, emigration, revolution list the gamut ... with all that is lacking how can people understand LOVE?.

Love.. a shared.. thing.. a ‘spandrel’ ( something of a descriptor) oxygen..(descriptor) .

It is utterly mind boggling that PSfB, President Shit for Brains.. Donald J. Trump is not a shared experiencethat that is.. not only universally rejected.. but reviled as a ‘thing’ we would normally hold our nose too as we scraped it off the sole of our shoe. This narrow septum freak, this dry lipped pancake makeup wearing Nazi rehash, undoubtedly has no concern for a thing beyond chaos.

Chaos.. for the petty dictator is easy.. when you’re just a realtor it’s even easier. ( buy and sell land, buildings. buy and sell people) It’s not a good fit for a President of the United States. In fact it’s not a good fit for the leader of any country is it? . At this stage of life..the year 2020.. we know the bad leaders.. they’re the deniers..They deny democracy, they subvert democracy. For the denier..an open society is the enemy. Dissent is the enemy. A free and open election becomes a tyranny, a fraud. There is a good reason that PBS has been airing a documentary about the “Rise of the Nazis’ Nazism is not.. in reality..too far removed from the Social Darwinism of modern Libertarianism. ( there it is.. I can and will bring the comparison to the page)

PSfB is a Social Darwinist, there’s no doubt about it. Vacillators are enablers. ( no doubts there) I am not willing nor will I accept a “lesser of evils’ payoff.

There has to be acceptance that the path traveled these past four decades has culminated in the abomination of President Shit for Brains. (Donald J. Trump). PSfB and his crew are clearly/stupidly following the path that was trodden by the ghastly monsters who made their mark in Germany as early as 1933.

What “Rudy” Giuliani and company are doing to this country can only be equated too what history recorded from the third decade of the 20th century. America’s mayor.. becomes a Goering type. A freakish, propagandist. A Liar for Libertarianism. A propagandist for Social Darwinism. Giuliani is assaulting America, He is insulting Americans. He has decided that gaslighting good people for his personal preferences is a deal/opportunity not to be ignored. This current White House is selling out Democracy for a few gold coins.. and their MAGA, banner waving numb tards..”truths go marching on” followers. Giuliani's press conference was a weirdness emphasized by his hair dye dripping down his cheeks. The Daily Shows Trevor Noah joked that it was as though Giulianis’ “brain was Shitting”.

I’m attuned to the sound of spraying water. While..just this evening..preparing a measly frozen pizza for dinner. (Of which I consumed a third) There was the sound of spraying water.. Oh My.. my brain shouts.. the sound of ‘spraying water’. My actions are instantaneous but in my mind a thousand years have passed. A fitting on my toilet decided that dinner time on a Friday night.. while I am reading forums and news.. tuning into the latest horror was the time to split.. water is spraying to the ceiling and pouring down everywhere..I hate this shit show.

I’ve stopped the leak.. I’ve dried the puddles.. I ate 2 more slices.. drank just one tall boy beer...OKAY maybe 2 more than 1.. Its Friday.. This week I’ve put out fires on the job.. Fires at home. A couple beers are not going to fix PSfB, A couple beers aren’t going to fix the historical road America/the World seems to want to travel.

Good stream, Taylor. Disgust, absolute disgust, is the rational reaction to what our soon-to-be former PSfB is trying to do.

@DWill: You have to know.. The fact that you personally backed me on my previous post means more than can be imagined. Thanks. I can tell you and yours are good people.

Taylor wrote:@DWill: You have to know.. The fact that you personally backed me on my previous post means more than can be imagined. Thanks. I can tell you and yours are good people.

Taylor, et al.,

I also feel like I'm in the company of good people. Thanks for being there!

Don Trump is now Don Quixote, tilting at windmills of fraud even after doing what all the world--but not he!--views as conceding.

Counting down the days until the retirement of the "Trump Watch" thread. It's about 45 days until Biden is sworn in. I hope there will be no interest in, or reason for, watching this disaster of a human being after he joins the ex-presidents club. Opinions differ as to whether he will fade from public view, as his legal concerns entangle him or perhaps his "loser" status finally sinks in with his followers. One thing that seems clear is that Trumpism will have a longer life, so Trump will certainly leave a legacy. You can see by their recent remarks that the leading Republican challengers--Rubio and Cruz-- have learned at the feet of Trump.

We all knew how Trump was likely to act if he lost, but seeing that play out still shocks and amazes. The worst aspect for me of this attack on democracy is that the country was due a big shot of confidence in itself, and this was delivered in the form of an election carried out superbly well in the most difficult of circumstances. The leader of the country has done his very best to turn this victory for us all into a cesspool of fraud and corruption, and for millions of people, he succeeded. They believe him. As usual, he takes the very crime he's committing and turns it around. He postures as the defender of democracy as he acts to destroy it.

DWill wrote:One thing that seems clear is that Trumpism will have a longer life, so Trump will certainly leave a legacy.

I'm increasingly concerned that Trump is a symptom of an underlying disease that isn't getting any better. We select and deselect where our information comes from amidst the ocean of sources, and that fuels an alternate universe. It isn't necessarily a conscious choice on what sources we let in either; all it takes is a temporary indifference to controlling our biases. The seed grows each time.

I truly don't think half the population is stupid. I don't think they're being intentionally misled in most cases(intentional being the operative word). I think the problem with belief is systemic, but not controlled by any sort of agency.

Part of the issue is along the lines of Haidt's ideas - where our foundational values affect what we tend to believe on the political spectrum. Another part of the issue is the media algorithms that feed us news, and reinforce those beliefs.

Interbane wrote:I truly don't think half the population is stupid. I don't think they're being intentionally misled in most cases(intentional being the operative word). I think the problem with belief is systemic, but not controlled by any sort of agency.

Part of the issue is along the lines of Haidt's ideas - where our foundational values affect what we tend to believe on the political spectrum. Another part of the issue is the media algorithms that feed us news, and reinforce those beliefs.

Well, okay, but a lot of cherry-picking goes on by the likes of the Fox News commentators, leaving aside Breitbart and the new crop of news sources trying to outflank Fox, such as One America News. We know that Breitbart was spearheaded by Steve Bannon, who has shown his true colors as a scammer. Sure, he believes conservative stuff, but just as a law firm puts their top priority on winning the case, so the AltRight puts their top priority on generating heated feelings from their followers. Did Alex Jones intentionally mislead people? Of course. Of course he did. And still does. All he has to do is put forward the theories that he wishes were true, and, like Trump, filter mildly for surface credibility (and the more riled up they can get people, the less attention needs to be paid to credibility).

In the interest of even-handedness, MSNBC and HuffPost also work more on generating anger than on getting the perspective right, but they have not, so far, gone into the unprofessional business of spreading falsehood, as, say, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson most certainly have. Motivated reasoning crosses the line into motivated belief pretty easily, and the unprofessional press feels no burden to admit the errors they have made in that pursuit, thus freeing them from the constraints that might stop a more mainstream outfit from spreading lies.

Interbane wrote:I'm increasingly concerned that Trump is a symptom of an underlying disease that isn't getting any better. We select and deselect where our information comes from amidst the ocean of sources, and that fuels an alternate universe. It isn't necessarily a conscious choice on what sources we let in either; all it takes is a temporary indifference to controlling our biases. The seed grows each time.

I actually came to this thread to push in the opposite direction. Some of my conservative friends on Facebook spent quite a bit of time listening to the hearings on election irregularities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and maybe Wisconsin. Now, I learned about this from correcting one of many ginned up scandals that get spread on social media. (A source "discovered" that tens and even hundreds of thousands of voters had submitted change of address forms but continued to vote in the states they had left. Sounds like a scandal, right? I did it for decades, completely legally. If you move abroad, you are supposed to vote in the state you last resided in. I pointed this out, but did the posting person take it down? Of course not.)

What irritates me is that these hearings, held by state legislatures in the relevant states, were highly publicized on right wing media, but not mentioned by the New York Times, and, as far as I can tell, by CNN either.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... fraud.html
A lot of similar stuff, e.g. in Pennsylvania some Republicans-only "hearings" at Gettysburg, are ginned up just to rile people up and are untethered to reality, but if you listen through the Michigan hearings you can tell there really were irregularities.

I'm glad the mainstream media don't swallow all the swill put out by, for example, Rudy Giuliani, and instead check out the facts first. But I fear they are being too cautious (or just biased) and refusing to give any publicity to more serious election stories. I would love to have those things exposed as fake, as many accusations have, but it looks to me like they are sitting on real stories for fear of undermining the credibility of Biden's win. Sorry, but that is just the kind of bias and self-censorship that drives people into the arms of the hatemongers.

So when we underline the motivated reasoning that leads people to accept swill (like the story about out-of-state voters who continue to vote), lets not forget the grain of truth in the accusations of bias, which grows into people giving themselves permission to believe that tripe.