SlowBoy
8mo ago
but if anyone who thinks he's a con, a huckster, and yes, corrupt enough to become dictator if handed the opportunity has irrational TDS
Yes, thinking that Donald Trump is going to become a dictator is TDS. Likewise, in the fields of construction reality TV politics business and marketing he's probably one of the most successful Americans ever. The guy redefined construction in Manhattan and turned his properties into a billion-dollar empire, spending a life constructing properties and projects all around the world, synonymous with luxury, just the ones in the public consciousness, then he got bored and did reality TV and dated supermodels and became President of the United States in his 70s -- sure, he's a conman because he did Steaks or whatever. Yeah, Trump really didn't do anything all that interesting really, and you're perceptive to see right through his little deception game.
Dude, I'm sure you really believe that and having read your posts over the last few months, there isn't much else I can say that would be charitable, but I will say that if Trump becomes president I will genuinely wish for him to prove you right and me wrong.
We have rockets that can land on towers in the air now. We are going to build a spirit of building things again, we are going to make America great again, greater than ever before. We have the capacity, we have the smartest people in the world, we have factories lying empty ready to turn on, we have so much potential, nobody has ever had potential like we have. America is the New World, the Classical era and the Renaissance have nothing on what we can do.
Maybe not. And what is your glory? Chanting "MAGA" at doubters?
My friends and I are some of the smartest people in the world, and some of those people are even here on this forum, and I believe we can all move forward onto great and glorious things.
SlowBoy
8mo ago
You're too jaded to see what's right in front of you. The billionaire rocket space man sees it. A Kennedy sees it. Vivek, JD Vance, Tulsi, etc. The Trump coalition is made up of many of Trump's worst former enemies, because he's a literal anime hero. This is why America is the greatest country on earth, because we believe in the power of friendship, we're going to fix the entire world, it's cringe all the way down. Trump started a movement and this is how the future will remember us: the Trump Era. The Trump Era was when we had Michael Jackson and Muhammed Ali and the internet and Trump. The Trump Era was either the era where Elon Musk brought mankind to Mars, or the last era where people dreamed big enough to believe it was possible. They had coca-cola, and big macs, and monster trucks, and guns. They were the fattest, loudest, dumbest, sickest, most foolish, most gullible, most annoying people on Earth. They did the most important things that have ever been done. They were the greatest people on Earth.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Amazing. It's as if four years of arguing about the 2020 election have left no impression on you, and you've made yourself totally impervious to what the other side actually believes. Vote counting stopped in several swing states simultaneously in the dead of night? Mail-in irregularities? Pandemic rules? Ballot "curing"? You must not have heard. I suppose, then, the only rational hypothesis is that everything other people believe is silly.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Despite the fact that we said we won, you said we didn't win. That's fraud!
Your definitions have made a certain kind of political dissent a priori criminal. But our rights don't descend from the Constitution, they descent from nature, and it cannot be a crime to contest the political process.
SlowBoy
8mo ago
I don't think he has a plan to become dictator, because that would be too much planning.
Go listen to the Joe Rogan interview or something, the career Donald Trump has had requires oodles of planning, the man is simply smart enough that he can plan and improvise on the plans and execute faster than most of the people around him. The idea that Trump can't plan or won't plan out of some personal foible is TDS. The man is one of the most successful people on the planet, that doesn't just happen.
Honestly, if there is any Trump-related derangement going on, your hagiographic description of him as if he's one of the greatest Americans to ever live strikes me as far more detached from the reality of the man.
The man took his father's modest real estate business in Queens and turned it into a premire luxury empire in New York. He convinced dozens of successful men to back his moonshot Trump Tower project, which he turned into a symbol of strength that revitalized the entire city. He built a tower at the city at the center of the world and put his name on it. Celebrities lined up to live there. The Trump name became synonymous with luxury all over the world. How many people could do that? There is not a single person having this discussion, here, twitter, TV, cable news, blogging -- capable of doing any of that, and Trump had a big enough vision to see it all from the beginning.
Trump turned that into an incredibly lucrative real estate empire, doing constant deals, being involved in projects all over the world, synonymous with luxury. He dated supermodels, consecutively, raised a family with them. Did business all over the world, went bankrupt a few times, reinvented himself in reality TV, casinos. The man is involved in hundreds of projects that don't reach
Fine, none of that means anything, he's just a businessman at this point, and we have lots of those. But within that world he's been incredibly, exceptionally successful, one of the richest men in the world, objectively loaded with one of the most interesting biographies in American history. His uncle had the Tesla patents and was a professor at MIT. His third wife was a Slovenian supermodel.
Then he gives all that up to run for President, and he runs on the message that the American dream is dead, and nobody believes in it anymore, but that's wrong, we're the greatest country on earth, and we're going to be greater than ever before, we have the people and the factories and the talent and the work, and that's what America is, and it's so easy, I've done it myself and I will teach you.
I don't think this is being hagiographic: The man is so ludicrously competent and successful that few people are even capable of judging it. Nobody wants to believe it, everyone has to be cynical and above-it-all. The man is just constantly working on hundreds of projects that nobody hears about, and so we just hear about Trump steaks or the University or some other silly throwaway remark he didn't consider important at all, and we talk about these trivial nothings. It's so much easier to believe that he's a conman, or that cynicism is warranted and valid and always good -- and it sounds ridiculous to say: Actually, Trump is good, and that doesn't come with qualifications or criticism, because he's right. He's right about everything, we have the capacity to be great and he's done it before and he's going to show us.
Donald Trump is literally rewriting history, this is how people are going to think about it in the future. In 2015 he started the primary with 1%, and he took that and grew it into one of the most successful political movements in American history, he reignited the imagionations of millions of people. Nobody fifty years from now is going to remember Trump Steaks, or Stormy Daniels, or whatever the controversy du jour that cynics are talking about in the corner. People are going to remember that this man saved his country, he got shot in the head and chanted "Fight, fight, fight!," you don't know how to win but I will teach you, we can be greater than ever before, you're not ordinary, we are the greatest people on Earth. We talk like he talks now, we think about him constantly, some of his worst enemies have become his greatest allies. If Naruto Uzumaki was real and in the world, I woudln't sit around saying, gee, this Naruto guy has a lot of flaws, I need to be rationally critical of him, maybe he's done some cool things but he's not that great, really. I would say, wow, amazing, how can I be more like this guy? And this is what Trump is, this is what he does, he's the main character. That's the world he's creating, and instead of sitting on the sidelines scoffing at how at least I'm not a sycophant, I'm rational, look at me, I can say something negative about Trump -- I'm going to admire everything the man is capable of and figure out how to be more and more like him. That's actually the only way to Make America Great Again, to dream bigger than ever before because we are the greatest people of all time, ever, in the whole history of the human race, and it's our task to build the new world.
SlowBoy
11mo ago
Trump flops on all the hard questions in a way that asks whether or not there is anything deeper in there than making the liberals cry.
Trump gets at the issues in a much deeper way than all the policy wonks cynically consumed by statistics and specifics. What do you do about the Ukraine War? It's not hard, you get on the phone with Putin, you stop the war with a phone call, this is literally how that works. You don't need answers to "hard questions," you need the vision to lead and inspire.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
I think your thinking is choked with lazy cliches that prevent me from respecting it seriously.
There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency
Trump did what, some diplomatic niceties? Said nice things about Putin personally? This is one of Trump's strengths, actually: he doesn't bloviate party line formulas, instead keeping his options open. This is in fact what forcing a TikTok sale is, a meaningless culture war distraction for the politicians to hage something to yell about to the base. (Who will buy TikTok? Probably another social media franchise that will procede to manipulate our discourse by algorithm.)
I accept that many posters will perhaps laugh at my characterization ofTrump:
Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”
Saying nice things about Russia isn't "proving the superiority of the Russian political system" to anybody. This is a low-effort bad-faith slur to avoid having to think about anything Tucker says. Chocolate cake in a parking lot? That's not disqualifying to anybody who can entertain an idea without accepting it. "Bastion of conservative values"? Is that a direct quote?
Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric
If you can't refute or even summarize his arguments why are you bringing him up at all?
SlowBoy
1yr ago
The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
This is a really bad cliche by now. Putin represents a moderate faction within Russia compared to the hardliners who wanted to invade 10 years ago after Maidan. Putin did not single-handedly launch the war (if one single man is reaponsible, it would probably be Strelkov). And Putin is not irrational for feeling threatened by NATO and the US.
SlowBoy
9mo ago
What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.
JD Vance is actually speaking to the public as an adult instead of giving empty word salad platitude answers.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
so clearly I'm capable of having a decent conversation with people who hold very different beliefs
Good for you? I don't know who you are. This reads like you are trying to prove you're better than OP.
I think if you had stopped at your first two paragraphs ("Consider that [...] Orange Man Bad and TDS") you would have made a merited point and not sounded like you had something to prove.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Russia is producing ammunition faster than the West is.
as a western european I’m happy to foot the bill
Don't worry, you will. Thanks! - American
SlowBoy
11mo ago
Obama governed horribly -- Obamacare, IRS political targetting, enshrining disparate impact, fast and furious, Benghazi, ISIS, etc etc
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Trump made the mistake of building a personality cult instead of a party.
This is what passes for analysis, I guess. Question: How much of the GOP was amenable to MAGA in 2016 vs now?
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Politely, respectfully, courteously: Perhaps you have no taste?
Saying that poetry has been superseded by song is like saying that cooking has been obviated with fast food. They are often the same thing! It sounds like you like superstimulus. Do you goon?
At the same time, music is very different from poetry. The fact that poetry has no tune is a strength! The emphasis is on the flow and texture of the words themselves, not how they've been strung out along a series of notes. It's fine if you don't have the attention span, but come on, it's only broccoli, it's not going to kill you, I can deep-fry them if you want.
And music and poetry have always co-existed, so to say that one has "superseded" another makes me wonder if you think we only recently invented good music. Well, if you want to argue that Lizzo is the greatest musical artist of all time, it is bad bitch o'clock, yeah, it's thick-thirty.
Anyways, to prove my point, I have attached a poem of my own composition. Please now reconsider whether poetry, in your words, "truly" ""cannot"" """rival the Xbox Kinnect Virtual Reality Experience""":
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse was sucking cock
Hickory dickory cum
And two were up his bum
It's only considered fraudulent after the fact, when it's failed. How can they have known themselves to be fraudulent when it had never been tried before, and, in fact, was supported by many as a legitimate alternative?
SlowBoy
1yr ago
It's not actually a crime to send letters to Congress. Nor is it fraud to sign a piece of paper saying you believe.
SlowBoy
2yr ago
I'm willing to give the creators the benefit of the doubt here. Many Americans really are just that ignorant about basic history. In communities like The Motte or 4chan or internet forums and history twitter there will be a few smart guys who know everything about Rome. We have a background literacy, even if most posters don't know much or care. Pop culture doesn't have this. The average person doesn't know much and doesn't care much.
SlowBoy
7mo ago
The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.
SlowBoy
7mo ago
Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.
SlowBoy
8mo ago
Probably some of the tech visionaries, if Elon comes anywhere close to Mars then his companies, some of the most valuable anywhere in the world, would be currently dramatically undervalued. Trump wants to dramatically expand energy and construction and those are good bets. Tariffs are intended as a policy to increase American manufacturing, which could imply a genre of good investments. If RFK is able to effectuate change at FDA it'd be good to bet on the health of the average person, and maybe against the worst excesses of big pharma.
SlowBoy
11mo ago
Wanting to kill the president is disgusting. It's morally reprehensible. There's not some "both sides" hypocrisy consistency "true free speech" liberal norm where I'm forced to concede that, hey, live and let live man. "I want to kill the president." "That's disgusting." "I'm only joking." "Oh, ok, sounds like free speech."
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Why else are there 85 different sects which have had (and still do have) their own violent confrontations?
Why do you assume violence is immoral?
SlowBoy
1yr ago
This is a glib argument. Donor influence is legendary in American politics, and Trump famously does not need their money. Are you suggesting that Trump's policies come from his donors? This is the charge levied at Haley et al.
I don't know if saying this is against the rules, so I'm trying to say this politely: I think this kind of posting needs to be bullied. Low-effort whining about how the minutiae of every debate moment and quip is a depressing state of mind. It's extremely tiresome -- Trump raised himself from private citizen to President of the United States by shitposting and debating, backseat driving is extremely tedious.
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