Funny events in anti-woke world

The Rogue Wolf

Stealthy Carnivore
Legacy
Nov 25, 2007
16,878
9,564
118
Stalking the Digital Tundra
Gender
✅
As fox's most fervant viewers move to more radicalised sources of misinformation since conspiracy theorism has taken full hold, it only makes a desperate sort of sense that Tucker submits and panders to the new extremist bottom line. The already tumultuous Overton window buckles under our own collective madness.

Yeah, once Fox finally dumps Carlson, he'll have a lifetime gig at OAN. At least until someone else outcrazies them.

I'll find a level to go even beyond superhuman! YaAAaaaaaaHhhhhhhhh!
Is your drill the drill that will pierce the heavens? I mean, I've got a DeWalt, but I'm not sure it's up to the job.
 

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
9,050
3,037
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
Yeah, once Fox finally dumps Carlson, he'll have a lifetime gig at OAN. At least until someone else outcrazies them.
You know what I dislike most about Carlson. He presents a range of possible scenarios. Which is fine, he can journalist it up and provide a wide range of information. Which can seem unbiased. But then he pretends that the scenario he advocates for is somehow THE scenario that's actually happening. Despite just providing alternative potential scenrios. The break in reality yoh have to have to do that is astounding

And, somehow, this works. On millions of people.
 

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
12,102
6,381
118
Country
United Kingdom
It's limited in that it's a discrete problem and again, it's a problem that is currently killing us in representative democracy because it has nothing to do with the structure in how you come to decisions.
It has a hell of a lot to do with the structure in how you come to decisions. Voting on an existing, written motion is one thing. Motions must be proposed and drafted, requiring sufficient awareness of the requirement and knowledge of surrounding price structures/ supply chains/ implementation. In every referendum mentioned so far, this has been handled by elected representatives.

That's not an elected representative, you're spouting nonsense. Asking a lawyer to draw up a legal document for others to vote on is neither a hierarchy nor an elected position.
You've literally been pointing to a constitution drafted by members of the Chilean Constitutional Convention, an elected body.


How many elected representatives know this?

FUCKING THE EXACT SAME PROPORTION BECAUSE THEY'RE THE SAME PEOPLE. WHY DOES WINNING AN ELECTION MAKE YOU SMARTER?
Calm the hell down.

Winning an election does not "make you smarter". It gives you a job which entails knowledge and research of specific areas. Look at the National Assembly mentioned by Seanchaidh; most members elected were not career politicians, but upon being elected were provided with extensive training and research in order to fulfil the role.

No, you just have a lower threshold to propose an idea than you do to pass it, literally exactly how it works now.
*quick look at the government UK petitions website*

Hrmmm. I do not want to spend most of my working week voting on this bollocks, and nor do I want the chance for this stupid shit to pass.
 

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
12,102
6,381
118
Country
United Kingdom
It's also completely counter to your whole premise for why direct democracy is bad, as has been said multiple times.
Your example of representative democracy functioning well runs entirely counter to my argument that representative democracy is preferable.

Lol ok.

Only you would look at the current political landscape and say there are meaningful safeguards.

Meanwhile, let's look at the merits of representative democracy and how fast they've come to the aid of people. Gay marriage (approved years after it was popular), gay rights (approved years after it was popular), minimum wage hike (still not approved despite it winning direct democracy initiatives), drug reform (still not approved despite it winning direct democracy initiatives), leaving Afghanistan and Iraq (years after everyone was sick of it), universal healthcare (still not approved despite popular support), climate legislation (still not approved despite popular support), funding utilities (still not approved despite popular support), etc.

What have they beaten the public to the punch on? Well we banned alcohol once. We reformed banking rules that hollowed out the industry and led to a massive financial crash (where were the experts legislating wisely?). We destroyed safeguards between corporate money and political action to give money an outsized influence on politics (something you say representative democracy guards against). I think you might be full of shit.
I did not say the safeguards are sufficient. They obviously aren't. I don't know how many times I have to say that representative democracy is not great, and is not functioning as it should.

Firstly, when you say "despite popular support", you're referring to popular support for the idea in principle. You know that polls can return either popular support or popular opposition to the same issue depending on how it's written in the questionnaire, right? Actual specific measures with the requisite detail and practicality, no, those ain't getting meaningfully drafted or passed.

Imagine the motion to establish NHS-- a system of universal healthcare provision implemented by representative democracy-- being drafted with sufficient detail and practicality by the general public at large.

Well luckily you're here to save us all with your big brain. King Silvanus, who knows his fellow man needs an iron fist to keep them in line.
Oh god, if only.
 

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
Legacy
Jun 6, 2008
36,491
3,688
118
It has a hell of a lot to do with the structure in how you come to decisions. Voting on an existing, written motion is one thing. Motions must be proposed and drafted, requiring sufficient awareness of the requirement and knowledge of surrounding price structures/ supply chains/ implementation. In every referendum mentioned so far, this has been handled by elected representatives.
No they haven't, they've been done by legal adjuncts who actually do the writing, elected representatives don't do the writing themselves.

You've literally been pointing to a constitution drafted by members of the Chilean Constitutional Convention, an elected body.
Yeah, a bunch of rando people pulled off the street, not your vaunted wise elected people who know law or whatever you're on about.

Calm the hell down.
No, stop saying stupid shit.

Winning an election does not "make you smarter". It gives you a job which entails knowledge and research of specific areas.
It takes a lot of balls to look at the current elected bodies and say they're largely experts on anything. You live in a fantasy land. Being elected requires no knowledge, no research, no commitment to knowledge. You can't say elections offer this when they literally do not require this. You're talking out your ass.

Your example of representative democracy functioning well runs entirely counter to my argument that representative democracy is preferable.

Lol ok.
Because it's run by those stupid proles you despise so much.

I did not say the safeguards are sufficient. They obviously aren't. I don't know how many times I have to say that representative democracy is not great, and is not functioning as it should.
And every single safeguard. Every. Single. Safeguard. Can be implemented in direct democracy too. There's literally no advantage or disadvantage here.

Firstly, when you say "despite popular support", you're referring to popular support for the idea in principle. You know that polls can return either popular support or popular opposition to the same issue depending on how it's written in the questionnaire, right? Actual specific measures with the requisite detail and practicality, no, those ain't getting meaningfully drafted or passed.

Imagine the motion to establish NHS-- a system of universal healthcare provision implemented by representative democracy-- being drafted with sufficient detail and practicality by the general public at large.
I can imagine it pretty easily. After all, the only difference between drafting it how it was and by direct democracy is how many people vote on it.
 
Last edited:

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
Legacy
Jun 6, 2008
36,491
3,688
118
*quick look at the government UK petitions website*


Hrmmm. I do not want to spend most of my working week voting on this bollocks, and nor do I want the chance for this stupid shit to pass.
Oh god, if only.
And this, this right here, is how I know you're a fake fucking leftist. You don't like representative democracy because it's more efficient or preferable, you like it because you're stuck up and hate your fellow man. It was implicit before that you don't consider yourselves one of the "uneducated", that you consider yourself above others, but I didn't honestly expect you to just come out and admit it. You think you should be able to express your opinion on specific issues and implementations, but expect others to not, and I seriously can't stand that in a person.

It's why your whole argument has been wonky and self-contradicting, the fundamental bedrock of your argument and likely all your arguments is that you're right and anyone who argues against you must be wrong, because they're just not as smart as you. You're less a socialist and more a monarchist. Or you're a leftist in the way Pol Pot was a leftist.
 

Agema

Do everything and feel nothing
Legacy
Mar 3, 2009
9,217
6,487
118
You know what I dislike most about Carlson. He presents a range of possible scenarios. Which is fine, he can journalist it up and provide a wide range of information. Which can seem unbiased. But then he pretends that the scenario he advocates for is somehow THE scenario that's actually happening. Despite just providing alternative potential scenrios. The break in reality yoh have to have to do that is astounding

And, somehow, this works. On millions of people.
Yeah well: promoting dubious hypotheses is a basic misinformation tactic. "This might not be happening. But here's thirty minutes straight discussing a one-sided story of what it means if it is happening." Much of the audience are liable to forget the whole "This might not be happening" disclaimer.

The real concern about Tucker Carlson is that he's probably an outright white nationalist: just well enough concealed, and protected by a major network.
 
  • Like
Reactions: XsjadoBlayde

Agema

Do everything and feel nothing
Legacy
Mar 3, 2009
9,217
6,487
118
It takes a lot of balls to look at the current elected bodies and say they're largely experts on anything. You live in a fantasy land. Being elected requires no knowledge, no research, no commitment to knowledge. You can't say elections offer this when they literally do not require this. You're talking out your ass.
The profession that elected representatives are joining is politics. They are, de facto, professional politicians and if they aren't expert at it when they start, they should be with a few years experience.

But politicians don't actually make do things in the way you seem to make out. Yes, they are usually little more than dilettantes in terms of specific topics (defence, environment, finance, etc.) But they're not the ones who are drawing up complex schemes - there are agencies and departments and so on full of professionals to do that for them. Their job is to understand how stuff works in government, and weigh up a lot of information from various sources to make effective holistic decisions. In some respects, you don't want a technical subject expert: you want an political decision making expert.

And here, I think, politicians can surpass the general public, because they tend to understand how things work in government and are more likely to have this sort of holistic understanding. I accept that like in anything else, some are incompetent, lazy, corrupt, or generally ineffective. But on balance, they really do tend to know stuff the general public don't (and likely wouldn't, even with direct democracy) to facilitate good decision-making.

There is research on referenda, and they suggest that for good decision making, referenda need a lot of preparation and planning - public consultations, raising awareness, and production of complex plans, giving the public extremely clear and limited options. This is in some ways an example that it can be done. The flipside is that it is a heavily managed and slow process which requires a huge amount of guidance and control from political experts. Bills can contain a vast amount of essential nuance that the public are very unlikely to pick up on even if they get the overall gist. It's done for them and presented as an all-or-none package, where representatives are more able to negotiate the bill itself.

One of the most pressing reasons for representative democracy is that a lot of the public simply don't want to take on this work: the same sorts of reasons they hire cleaners to do their housework, butchers to chop up their meat for them, and bus drivers to move them around. Start asking people whether they want to spend 5h a week considering national policy. In practice, most of them would rather play Call of Duty, watch Squid Game or go to the gym instead.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Satinavian

ObsidianJones

Elite Member
Legacy
Apr 29, 2020
1,118
1,442
118
Country
United States
Yeah well: promoting dubious hypotheses is a basic misinformation tactic. "This might not be happening. But here's thirty minutes straight discussing a one-sided story of what it means if it is happening." Much of the audience are liable to forget the whole "This might not be happening" disclaimer.

The real concern about Tucker Carlson is that he's probably an outright white nationalist: just well enough concealed, and protected by a major network.
Honestly, I thought the real concern about Tucker Carlson is that he outed most of a party as being outright white nationalistic, and/or converted a good deal of them, painting it as "It's terrible you have to do this, but it's the only way you'll survive... THEY FORCED YOU INTO THIS"

The Milgram Shock Experiment and the Stanford Guard had a baby and it was Right Wing Media. It then used Mind Crush on American Values, and it was super effective.
 
  • Like
Reactions: XsjadoBlayde

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,180
969
118
Country
USA
"Who among us hasn't sent work emails with slurs?"

Conservatives live in a fascinating universe
I mean, as this is without a doubt targeted at media personalities criticizing him (rather than you or me), I suspect most of them to genuinely have slurs in old emails.
 

XsjadoBlayde

~it ends here~
Apr 29, 2020
3,376
3,500
118
Michigan now too.


A Michigan Republican lawmaker wore a pin with a flag with a “Q” on it as she addressed demonstrators at an election protest Tuesday in Lansing supported by former President Donald Trump—and made clear she buys into the sprawling conspiracy theory.

Michigan Rep. Daire Rendon told VICE News that the Q represents “a group of people who are digital warriors,” who “pass information around and reveal information that’s been kept hidden for a very long time,” based on information from the “highest level of intelligence in the United States government”—tropes of the false conspiracy theory central to QAnon.

Rendon confirmed to VICE News that she wore the pin, an American flag with a gold Q on it that was spotted by the Detroit News’ Craig Mauger, during her speech, and said that she wore it partly because she knew there’d be plenty of like-minded people in the crowd.

“A lot of the people that are here today follow the same channels, and they understand,” Rendon said. “They’re not buying the same mainstream pablum that gets fed to us every day by the mainstream media.”

Her open embrace of the movement is the latest evidence of how mainstream QAnon has become within the Republican Party, especially among pro-Trump supporters.

Trump endorsed the rally, which pushed widely disproven claims that the election was stolen from him.
“Big Michigan rally coming up on Oct. 12th, on the Capitol steps in Lansing, where patriots will demand a forensic audit of the 2020 presidential election scam,” Trump said in a Friday statement. “The voter fraud is beyond what anyone can believe.

Anyone who cares about our great country should attend, because unless we look to the past and fix what happened, we won’t have a future or a country.”

Trump’s claims have been debunked extensively, including by a report conducted by Michigan Senate Republicans that found there’d been no systemic fraud in their state’s election, which Biden won by more than 150,000 votes.
But that’s not enough for Rendon, who told the crowd of hundreds that Michigan needed to have a “forensic audit.”

“We need a forensic audit, and we need it now. You prove Biden won. It’s time to take a stand and we can’t be the only state left out,” she said.

Trump has repeatedly flirted with QAnon supporters, refusing to condemn or distance himself from the movement in the run-up to the 2020 election, and Q flags and T-shirts are a common sight at Trump rallies. This has emboldened its supporters.
Members of the QAnon community were some of the earliest and loudest proponents of the “Big Lie” that Trump was the real winner of the election. A survey from March found that almost a quarter of Republicans believed that “a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” controlled the government, the banks, and the media in the U.S. And their power seems to only be growing within the GOP: At least 45people who have expressed support for QAnon have already announced bids for Congress in 2022, according to a tracker by Media Matters for America, and others are running for statewide positions—some with Trump’s explicit endorsement.

QAnon is the name of the sprawling, cult-like community of conspiracy theorists, which grew out of a single post titled “Calm Before the Storm,” on the image-board site 4chan in October 2017. The anonymous poster claimed to have a top-level Q security clearance, and was thus privy to highly classified information. The central claim made by the eponymous “Q” was that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was working alongside Trump to take down a global cabal of pedophiles and child sex traffickers, including many prominent Democrats and celebrities.

Rendon claimed she’s “never heard of QAnon as being an existing entity” but broke it down into Q, which she insisted was “the highest level of intelligence in the United States government,” and “Anon, people who are digital warriors.”

When VICE News asked Rendon if she believed that top government officials were involved in a child sex ring, she said, “That’s part of it.” But she pivoted to other topics, including the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“I think a lot of things happened in the last election. President Trump told us they’re going to cheat, they’re going to cheat. We realized that was the plan. And we knew that because it had happened before— only this time it was done at just a much higher level,” Rendon said.

Rendon was one of two Republican Michigan lawmakers who initially supported a late-December lawsuit that challenged President Joe Biden’s election wins in five swing states based on the argument that state legislatures hadn’t confirmed his wins. But she’s not just some fringe lawmaker in the statehouse: Rendon chairs the Michigan House of Representatives' Insurance Committee.

Some of QAnon’s followers have been linked to violent acts. QAnon believers are among those facing charges for violent crimes committed during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. A devout Christian surfer allegedly murdered his two young children with a spear gun—and told the FBI that he had been “enlightened” by QAnon, which led him to believe that his children were going to “grow into monsters.” QAnon has also been associated with at least six kidnapping plots in the U.S. and one recently in France.

Michigan has emerged as a hotbed of violent extremism and conspiracy theories over the last year, even though some of that activity hasn’t been explicitly linked to QAnon. Some of the most unruly anti-lockdown protests unfolded at Michigan’s state Capitol—where Rendon spoke on Tuesday.

Last April, armed protesters and militia members swarmed the building, adding an uneasy element to an already fraught political situation. Months later, several Michigan men who adhered to the anti-government Boogaloo movement were accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason. What’s more, a handful of Michigan’s sheriffs are openly aligned with the anti-government “Constitutional Sheriffs Movement.” Sheriff Dar Leaf of Barry County tried to coordinate with Trump advisers to “seize” Dominion voting machines. He also hired a private detective to go county to county to sniff out evidence of voter fraud.

In early summer, the FBI warned lawmakers that they should brace for the possibility of further acts of violence from the community’s more militant actors, especially as many struggle to cope with the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Rendon said she didn’t consume everything the QAnon community put out—but she made it clear she was involved in certain channels, including ones pushing the idea that the U.S. government was complicit in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s.

“I follow Q a little bit. I don’t have time to follow them too closely. Information comes out of a lot of their channels frequently, but it takes a lot of time, and I don’t have that kind of time. I follow those things that interest me. I’m one of those Americans who remember the day President Kennedy was shot. I’m that America. What am I interested in? I’m interested in the truth. And the truth is not pretty,” she said.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
12,102
6,381
118
Country
United Kingdom
No they haven't, they've been done by legal adjuncts who actually do the writing, elected representatives don't do the writing themselves.
Oh, of all the meaningless quibbles. They don't put pen to paper. But they decide on the content.


Yeah, a bunch of rando people pulled off the street, not your vaunted wise elected people who know law or whatever you're on about.
???

They were elected. They're elected representatives. Sorry, do you believe that if someone is elected as a representative, but they're not a career politician, then that somehow makes them not an elected representative?

They weren't "rando people pulled from the street", stop feigning ignorance of the process behind your own example.

It takes a lot of balls to look at the current elected bodies and say they're largely experts on anything. You live in a fantasy land. Being elected requires no knowledge, no research, no commitment to knowledge. You can't say elections offer this when they literally do not require this. You're talking out your ass.
The fact that many current representative democracies are failing to live up to the name is not a condemnation of the process in principle, because the system I would advocate does not look much like the countries we live in.

Still, examples exist of elected bodies closer to the ideal. Such as... the Chilean Constitutional Convention, or the National Assembly in Cuba (the latter hamstrung by existing within an otherwise political dictatorship).

Because it's run by those stupid proles you despise so much.
And here again is the sheer refusal to engage with the argument I've actually made, and instead to hallucinate an altogether different position and then argue against that instead.

Do you think that if an elected representative is an ordinary person they somehow become not an elected representative? Do you believe that arguments for representative democracy somehow magically don't apply if the elected body in question is comprised of ordinary people?

I really have to wonder, when we're getting into the territory of you pointing to a body of elected representatives, and you argue they function well, and then argue that this is a mark against representative democracy in principle. The mind boggles at the mental gymnastics.


And every single safeguard. Every. Single. Safeguard. Can be implemented in direct democracy too. There's literally no advantage or disadvantage here.
Every single safeguard could theoretically be implemented. What proportion of people do you believe are aware of the need for them, or the form they must take?