Well, it's Over!

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MeDotOrg
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sun Feb 14, 2021 12:01 pm
MeDotOrg wrote:
Sun Feb 14, 2021 9:10 am
We were given a test, and we failed.
You should stop owning their failures.

- Doc
When I say 'we lost', what I mean is that we, as a country, lost something. I probably should have said 'The United States lost', but it feels personal.
Winston Churchill wrote:No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…"
For Democracy to work it doesn't have to be infallible. We will always make mistakes. But if we don't learn from our mistakes, if we don't course-correct, it can fail. I think as a democracy we just made a huge mistake. If we don't learn from this mistake we are in big trouble. The long moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but a little sunlight helps. We can only hope that what is learned about Trump in the next year will begin to diminish his influence.

But the question I keep asking myself is: How many people looking for political power in this country will look at the model of Donald Trump and say it could be done better, that he just wasn't sophisticated enough? That a better packaged version of the same ideas could be successful?

The moral of the story is yet to be written.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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An informed electorate is the bedrock of democracy. The problem, MDO, is one of Conservatism and not the failings of democracy. The former is incompatible with the latter. To wit:

For Conservatism to succeed
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...

...There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.).

Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone..."

—Frank Wilhoit
Xanax and his ilk are the end game of this anti-intellectualism and procedural destruction of our public education system. That’s on Conservatives. They failed us. They work against their own idealism and don’t even realize it because they’re stupid, which is precisely the way their kings have engineered them to be.

- Doc
Last edited by Doctor CamNC4Me on Mon Sep 12, 2022 1:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Moksha
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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You have to admire Trump's lawyer for his pure evil and lying apologetic ways:

https://Twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1360716676778622978

I imagine he will now become a lawyer for both Trump and the Proud Boys.
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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Philo Sofee wrote:
Sun Feb 14, 2021 12:55 am
Gunnar wrote:
Sat Feb 13, 2021 11:17 pm
I hope this impeachment acquittal doesn't diminish the chances of successfully indicting and convicting him for other real life crimes he has actually committed. Can you imagine that? Trump going down in history as not only being the only President to be impeached twice, but the only president winding up in prison, despite having been acquitted in an impeachment trial? I find it interesting that Mitch McConnell is of the opinion that Trump may still be vulnerable to prosecution and conviction in ordinary criminal courts, even for the charges brought against him in the impeachment of which the Senate failed to convict him by the required 2/3 majority.
That piece of Crap doesn't have a moral bone in his body anymore than Trump does. Don't let his words fool you, he's a cowardly crook and immorally vaunted man.
I couldn't agree with you more. IMHO he deliberately pushed the date of the impeachment trial till after Trump officially left office so he could use that to excuse his not voting to convict Trump, in an attempt to retain some favor with Trump and his cult-like, sycophantic base, and then excoriated Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection, to gain favor with the growing anti-Trump faction of the GOP. He's trying to play both sides of the Republican divide over Trump, for his own selfish benefit. McConnell may be even more of a destructive danger to our democracy than Trump. I am inclined to believe that Trump may be merely a symptom or the spearpoint of a decades long process or campaign to undermine our democracy, and that McConnell is one of the key players, or even one of the chief architects of this process. This is what McConnell's determined blocking of Democrat nominated judges to fill vacancies, while frantically pushing through Republican nominated, ultra conservative nominees was all about.
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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The real problem in this country is that GOP voters don't vote based on policy, they vote based on identity ("I vote Republican because I'm a Republican, no matter what they do/don't do"). It's pretty laughable that they are so critical of identity politics, when that's all they know.
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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Image
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Gunnar
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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Some Schmo wrote:
Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:26 pm
The real problem in this country is that GOP voters don't vote based on policy, they vote based on identity ("I vote Republican because I'm a Republican, no matter what they do/don't do"). It's pretty laughable that they are so critical of identity politics, when that's all they know.
What truly breaks my heart about the Republican Party I once belonged to is how thoroughly it has been taken over and hijacked by the most hardcore and hateful fundamentalist religious bigots and racists. I was shocked to find out that there was still enough latent racist feelings among Americans to make it possible for Trump's blatant appeal to white supremacy and bigotry to actually succeed in acquiring enough of a following to win election to President. There is small consolation in the fact that he lost in terms of the popular vote, even in his first election. His divisive and hateful rhetoric should never have appealed to even a large enough minority to make an Electoral College victory possible.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Well, it's Over!

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Gunnar wrote:
Tue Feb 16, 2021 8:30 pm
Some Schmo wrote:
Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:26 pm
The real problem in this country is that GOP voters don't vote based on policy, they vote based on identity ("I vote Republican because I'm a Republican, no matter what they do/don't do"). It's pretty laughable that they are so critical of identity politics, when that's all they know.
What truly breaks my heart about the Republican Party I once belonged to is how deeply it has been taken over and hijacked by the most hardcore and hateful fundamentalist religious bigots and racists.
If you were a Republican again, and say, you were the Boss of the GOP, how would your Republican Party differ from the current Democratic Party?

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
Gunnar
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Re: Well, it's Over!

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Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Tue Feb 16, 2021 8:50 pm
If you were a Republican again, and say, you were the Boss of the GOP, how would your Republican Party differ from the current Democratic Party?

- Doc
Quite a bit, actually. What initially drove me out of the Republican Party was its increasingly radical and ignorant anti-science stance. Since then I have come to realize that there was much more wrong with the Republican Party than just their growing disrespect for and rejection of scientific reality. It is not just the GOP that has changed; I have changed as well since I left the party. I am much more progressively minded than I ever was as a Republican, and now find even the current Democrat leadership to be a bit too conservative and beholden to powerful, selfish and wealthy corporate interests. I vote Democrat mainly because they are a lesser evil than Republicans, in general, and are more likely to defeat them. I most favor the policies of the Green party (some of which are beginning to gain traction with more and more democrats as well), but voting directly for them now in today's political climate only increases the odds of a Republican victory. The damage already done by Republicans, under Trump, is already too great and will probably take decades to undo, if it can be undone at all.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Well, it's Over!

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

So, if you were Boss of the GOP you'd basically make it the Green Party? In other words, it looks like you both left the Party as it left you, and you're a democratic socialist now?
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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