Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Discussion in 'SBAF Blogs' started by purr1n, Dec 26, 2018.

  1. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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  2. jexby

    jexby Posole Prince

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  3. zerodeefex

    zerodeefex SBAF's Imelda Marcos

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    [​IMG]

    10/10
     
  4. LetMeBeFrank

    LetMeBeFrank Won't tell anyone my name is actually Francis

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    "First of all, I know evil. He's a very intelligent man. Great guy. Strong negotiator. I know more about evil than anyone in the world, believe me, I do research."

    "Evil? What you gotta under.... the point is... apples are great right off the branch, you sonofabitch."
     
  5. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    From my end Trump still has an edge in FL due to strong voter excitement for him and the GOP here. I was on I95 over the weekend and I saw some Trump Fan Club signs on giant billboards. Then again I am in Northeast FL, which is a very strong GOP stronghold due to suburbs (which hasn't been tilting towards the Dems as much as some were saying), retirees, and rural areas.

    Also, GOP of FL has done a fantastic job on voter registration. At 2016 Dems had a 300k voter registration advantage over the GOP, currently it is about 180,000 advantage Dems. I'm thinking when the registration period closes in FL (in FL to vote in an election you need to make sure you are registered 28 days before election day), that advantage might go down to 170,000. However, no political party controls the state registration of voters. Dems and GOP have about 36%/37% total amount of registered voters each while NPA/Independents are 25% (which went up by 10% over the last decade). However, keep in mind FL is a closed primary state so we get voters who vote in the GOP primary for example but in Nov votes Dem (and same in reverse as well).

    Barely seeing anything with Biden/Harris stuff/signs in my area. I can go into any suburb and see 10-20 Trump signs in a few blocks with giant Trump flags and tons of Black the Blue/No To Socialism signs as well. All these wedge issues get people to the polls and give political parties $$$$. I'm seeing the same excitement for Trump again as I did for Obama/Biden back in 08/12. I wouldn't be surprised Trump wins FL again in Nov. Some might say why he might win considering what he is saying/doing as of late. Consider that Florida gets a lot of conservatives/wealthy from very liberal states (NY/CA/IL) who are super pissed on how screw up the taxes and government are from those states. Then they move to FL and vote down ticket GOP to keep taxes low, focus on policing, and blah blah blah. Plus with retirees who vote GOP due to low taxes (which is important for retirement), and cheap housing, well you see the point on why the GOP is strong here.

    Also here's something that might become (but most likely will) a law in FL: https://www.flgov.com/2020/09/21/go...d-looting-and-law-enforcement-protection-act/

    Even if FL have strict laws on the books, lets scare anyone to prevent protesting due to our State Attorneys have broad powers as-is. The upcoming is design as another wedge issue to give the GOP the edge (if you vote Dem you do not believe in laws and policing, current talking points of the FL GOP). Also, FL for the most part didn't even have close the protesting unread in other cities. This is mostly due to strong laws favoring the police to stop any BS.
     
  6. rhythmdevils

    rhythmdevils MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    I read an article about democracies collapsing which compared Trump with the leaders who brought it down in those countries and it was scary shit.
     
  7. JK47

    JK47 Guest

    LOL, so was the comparison on Obama and Hitler.
     
  8. SSL

    SSL Friend

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    Where can I check that out, 4chan? Let me dig out my Pepe avatar.
     
  9. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    When will people realize that every four years we are repeating that South Park episode.

     
  10. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

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    I personally believe the fact that we have Trump and Biden is largely due to big media, big corp, big gov, and most importantly, the D + R parties working together to effectively stifle all competition (both from within the party or outside - i.e voices like Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Paul, Libertarian party, etc getting screwed). Last time I checked, monopolies and duopolies were still bad.

    However, the other part of it is a reflection of how America as a whole has declined since the mid 2000's. We have no one to blame but ourselves for this.
    The fact that we had Bush vs Kerry, Obama vs McCain, Obama vs Romney, Trump vs Hillary, and now Trump vs Biden is simply a reflection of America's decline in the last 15ish years (granted I thought Clinton and Bush Sr were bad too and Reagan was only a good actor who was in the right places at the right times). The same reflection can be seen in the loss of absolute American hegemony in the world and the complete dominance of the dollar in global economics, the current open-ness of BLM, Antifa, Proud Boys, and similar groups, the greater appeal of socialism now, general rise of poverty and decline in purchasing power of the average person (all while inflation is supposedly only at 1-2%.... sure....), rise in drug use especially amongst the poorer and/or rural parts of America (almost can't blame them - life looks bleak in many of these places), the fact that healthcare is still overpriced (forget universal insurance - adding more middle men is mathematically idiotic and only drains taxes, productivity, etc) and most importantly, what I perceive as the rise of 3rd world mentalities and behaviors that in about 1/2 of America, both left and right, that from what I can understand, would have been unthinkable 20ish years ago outside of fringe groups. On the rise of 3rd world mentalities - several friends who moved here within the last 10 years from 3rd world countries have all quietly expressed to me approximately "wow we thought America would be better b/c it's a great country that was built by great people and ideas - how come half the people here act 3rd world too"

    Could go on and on, but regardless of who wins, I have no hope in gov. Gov is ineffective as is, too big and bloated with no incentive to actually be efficient and effective and get stuff done, large corps have too strong of a choke-hold on our cheap to bribe politicians (if you're going to take bribes - at least do like Brazil or China and do millions at a time and be done after 3 or 4 bribes so you minimize damage instead of a lifetime of small "contributions" which maximize damage), and the general populace was somehow gullible enough to buy into the blame game narratives being pushed in education + media instead of looking around with their own eyes and fixing things.

    For my sake and the world's sake I hope things get better here... but I really don't see how it's going to happen anytime soon. Most people I meet out there can't get beyond "orange man bad" or "antifa bad" when it comes to stuff like this. My calls to forget this stuff and problem solve instead get met by glares of "angery / triggereddddddd" or lots of blame game.
     
    Last edited: Sep 30, 2020
  11. rhythmdevils

    rhythmdevils MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    i don’t know how to interpret this. Are you kidding and saying there’s nothing to the comparison I mentioned or do you actually think Obama is comparable to Hitler???? :eek:
     
  12. Tachikoma

    Tachikoma Almost "Made"

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    The orange man is very, very bad though. I'm not sure if the world as a whole could take another 4 years of the orange man.
     
  13. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    As much as I'm inclined to make a joke about things as a means of keeping my sanity, all you Americans have my sincere condolences for the very public bilateral pantsing your country received.

    But hey if y'all wanna laugh about some place else a certain dictator wannabe quite overtly asked Facebook to support their administration and most people are just taking it in stride despite how genuinely fucked up it is ¯\_༼ ಥ ‿ ಥ ༽_/¯

    "Philippine leader Duterte Lashes Out at Facebook After Fake Accounts Removed - The New York Times" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/business/rodrigo-duterte-facebook-philippines.html
     
  14. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    That debate was not fake news. It was a very real shit show.
     
  15. rhythmdevils

    rhythmdevils MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    As much as I hate Trump, Biden was so weak. Unwilling to take a stand for anything liberal, confused, just boring as hell regardless of the mad man he was debating. Even when he had time uninterrupted he didn't make his points clearly using good language. it ws always muddled and half communicated.

    Biden's going to be better than Trump for sure, but he'll be a nothing president. Won't accomplish anything, just like Obama. I can't fathom how he won the nomination except maybe people were all freaked out about covid and liked the idea of a comforting grandpa figure. And maybe people like nothing after trump.
     
  16. Ardacer

    Ardacer Friend

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    I'm not from USA, so I have very limited knoweledge, but I liked Sanders and his ideas.
     
  17. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

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    Just a rhetorical - would people have rated Obama as bad as Trump if the news had bombed him as hard as they bombed Trump every minute since before he was elected?
    To be clear, I dislike both roughly equally and have absolutely no problem saying that Trump has done a very bad job. But I ask this b/c I suspect public opinion of one is only better b/c the public perceptions machines mostly worked with him instead of very very strongly against.

    As for Biden being a do nothing - that's largely what I'm complaining about. Local, county, state, federal, and other - government just isn't structured to be effective and has no incentive either. We 95% can't blame this on any president IMO. We could have Einstein 2.0 as president and he would probably still get nothing done just b/c government is the way it is. Even things leaders get credit for seem to be really largely facilitated by the systems/departments beneath them that are only structured to operate a certain way and the elected leaders don't seem like they have much power to change/fix the systems/orgs.

    On top of that - why would they? There is minimal political benefit for them and a lot of risk. Most gov orgs/depts have a very strong interest to be as slow, conservative/cautious (like no risks, not politically) as possible, and for the employees, to not put themselves out of work. FDA and drug approvals as a random example. And of course as a leader I can't just pull the plug on a dysfunctional program or organization for total reform - politically I'll be criticized for "OHHHH XYZ hates such and such and he doesn't care about you - look he closed down a whole department that served millions of hardworking / impoverished / vulnerable Americans/favorite minority groups/whatever!!!!!" or "LOOK he stands for chaos and anarchy he wants to abolish the police department"... nevermind that abolition is meant to be followed by a new and reformed department.

    Which leads to my next example: police and all of the problems they have. It is not in their interest to reform and make their jobs harder. Why would they? They have a state monopoly on the legal use of force. There are no private police orgs, militias, etc that are officially recognized by the state that could compete with them (if anything, these orgs would be arrested or gunned down for being "radical fringe terrorist groups"). It's also strongly in their interest to "protect their lives" (which often results in abusing the general public and not protecting these lives) so they minimize risk to themselves over a 20 or so year career... which I get in the sense that any mistake could paralyze or kill them (but hey, if I paralyze you by mistake, just sue the department and the tax payer will take care of it... I just need to get the pension at the end... which you also pay for). I suspect many cops don't even do the dumb stuff they do with malicious intent - they legitimately think they're doing it right or for their safety even if it's clear to the public at large that something is wrong with the above picture. At the same time Bush, Obama, Trump, etc. did not waltz in and turn the police into this overnight.

    Even worse is qualified immunity or "civil asset forfeiture". Biggest piles of BS I can think of. Or even something simple holding cops to a lower standard than joe blow in some ways. The hell does pink shirt McMansion AR guy get charged with a felony for just holding his rifle on his property (finger not on trigger) with several potentially violent trespassers all around while the cops that actually shot and killed Breona + BF with their rifles (and lots of other botched no knocks) got in no trouble at all. Top it off by passing off the (high) costs of these botched no knocks on to the taxpayer where as many people get messed up by legal defense costs when having to defend their use of force. Even better - how can cops have a much lower hit rate on average and a higher rate of hitting the wrong people than joe blow with their use of firearms yet they get to keep doing so with little to no consequence. If we did this we would get multiple charges from reckless endangerment to attempted murder, etc. Also to be clear, I do not want to abolish police, but it needs some pretty serious reform at all levels.

    I could go on and on with many more examples of things wrong with gov groups big and small, but point is, I couldn't logically pin this type of stuff on just Bush, Obama, Trump, etc. This is some stuff that needs to happen at a societal level with some big brain thinky mode involved that goes in areas 95% out of their reach.

    Anyways, didn't mean to go on a long rant. I've been very discontent with many levels and aspects of government for a long time and I vented a bit. Back to normal programming and music/listening.
     
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2020
  18. Elysian

    Elysian Friend

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    California-centric post here. I'm starting to see "No on Prop 16" signage going up in my county. I was encouraged to see that the mid-Sept polling for Prop 16 was leaning towards no. I wish the Sacbee article separated out the Asian yes/no rather than just whites and Latinos. It was really interesting seeing the groups that are and aren't supporting Prop 16.
    https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article245777890.html

    As a personal anecdote, Prop 16 hit home a lot harder once I became a father. My longer-term personal decisions now are contextualized against my daughter's future and I don't want her to be discriminated against due to her ethnicity.

    I interview a lot of Gen Z candidates at work and I worry about the economic future we're leaving the next generation. I felt like my generation had a rough start due to lost wages and career growth from the dotcom crash and mortgage crisis but each subsequent generation seems like it's running into tougher and tougher challenges. The Bay Area is such a weird economic bubble that we have little contextualization to how things are in the rest of the country.

    I think @fp627 raised a lot of very good points. We don't train people to think critically these days and the media's economically incented to feed the beast. Everything's distilled to soundbites, we're told to hate each other, and I hear more and more people privately mention that they're afraid to share their real opinions otherwise they'll get fired by their employer and ostracized by family and friends.

    The sheer amount of social intimidation going on is frightening. I saw during the 9/11 era when I attended Berkeley and there was zero tolerance for non-liberal POVs (Free Palestine, Bushitler, affirmative action, eliminate Israel, South African apartheid, Che Guevara t-shirts, etc.), and I'm really sad to see that close-mindedness has exfiltrated to across the country.
     
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2020
  19. squishware

    squishware Friend

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    on a whole other plane
    There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution. - John Adams (October 1780)
     
  20. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    When I got out of college in the early 90s, it was still possible to put a down payment on a house in California if one pinched pennies for a few years. In the early 2000s, it was possible to put a down payment on a house if one had a good job, an established career, and two earners in a family. In the early 2010s, one could buy a house if they had prescient Muad-dib powahs to know not to get caught up in the mortgage loan scams of the mid 2000s (the vast majority didn't). Now in 2020, only rich Chinese who pay 100% in cash, people who scored in ventures, or people with rich parents, can take out mortgages.

    I don't see a good path forward for my kids going the usual route of getting an education (ever more unaffordable) for a career and embarking on that career. Well except for nurses. My son had said he thinks college isn't worth it and that he would rather take the money and start a business.

    All this stuff going on with the hardened views, left and right, is the result of the death of the American Dream. No good jobs for people who don't like to read books, that is no good manufacturing jobs. Insane executive pay, which means less money for the worker bees.

    The wealth inequality will be what starts a revolution, whether it by leftists wearing Che T-shirts or proud fascists with schlongs. The rich, in full Ferengi acquisition mode, are too dumb to get it, and by the time they do, it will be too late, and everyone will be worse off for it. We've already seen how fragile things are just because of a pesky virus, which really ain't all that bad in a historical context.
     
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2020

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