Funny Events of the "Woke" world

Agema

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Native Americans got small pox out of the deal and Europeans got syphilis.
FYI, it's not clear syphilis came to Europe from America, although it remains a strong hypothesis. There is also some evidence of syphilis, or syphilis-like diseases, existing in Europe long before Columbus - one of these may have become much more dangerous around the 1400s through environmental changes / mutations.
 
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Dirty Hipsters

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FYI, it's not clear syphilis came to Europe from America, although it remains a strong hypothesis. There is also some evidence of syphilis, or syphilis-like diseases, existing in Europe long before Columbus - one of these may have become much more dangerous around the 1400s through environmental changes / mutations.
The general hypothesis is that Europe and Asia also had forms of syphilis, but that Columbus brought back a form from the Americas in 1493 that was significantly more virulent in humans than the forms in the "Old World" which caused the epidemic level outbreak of syphilis in the early 1500s.
 
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Agema

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You misspelled "pity and resentment".
Oh man, you really should have stopped to think about your beloved orange Republican daddy before you tried that line. He's the king of resentment.

He is a non-stop gigafactory of manufactured, whining victimhood. He can't get into a speech on anything at all without swiftly bawling about the biased press and the stolen election and witch hunts and people thinking MLK had a bigger crowd and ungrateful Republicans and it's unfair that Biden quit and unfair Kamala is half black and unfair he even has to fight an election at all.

And when he occasionally touches on actual policy, he's vomiting forth a vast, toxic flood of resentment, about how Latin American drug dealers are going to pour across the border and rape your wives and turn your great, once-white nation brown, and black "welfare queens" are going to use the government to steal all your money, and they're going to take away your guns and your free speech and blah blah blah, and...

...you and your guys, you're loving it. You love feeding on that resentment, playing the victim, ratcheting up the fear and anger and outrage. Without resentment, a Trump rally would be a badly-dressed, overweight billionaire walking on stage, saying "It's great to see you, Cincinnati, the governor, he's a great guy, big supporter of me, we'd had our differences, he'd be nothing without me, I know him really well, we get on great" and then immediately walking off the stage again and the lights going out.
 

tstorm823

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Oh man, you really should have stopped to think about your beloved orange Republican daddy before you tried that line. He's the king of resentment.

He is a non-stop gigafactory of manufactured, whining victimhood. He can't get into a speech on anything at all without swiftly bawling about the biased press and the stolen election and witch hunts and people thinking MLK had a bigger crowd and ungrateful Republicans and it's unfair that Biden quit and unfair Kamala is half black and unfair he even has to fight an election at all.

And when he occasionally touches on actual policy, he's vomiting forth a vast, toxic flood of resentment, about how Latin American drug dealers are going to pour across the border and rape your wives and turn your great, once-white nation brown, and black "welfare queens" are going to use the government to steal all your money, and they're going to take away your guns and your free speech and blah blah blah, and...

...you and your guys, you're loving it. You love feeding on that resentment, playing the victim, ratcheting up the fear and anger and outrage. Without resentment, a Trump rally would be a badly-dressed, overweight billionaire walking on stage, saying "It's great to see you, Cincinnati, the governor, he's a great guy, big supporter of me, we'd had our differences, he'd be nothing without me, I know him really well, we get on great" and then immediately walking off the stage again and the lights going out.
Read your own post until you realize the level of lunacy you've reached. Someone suggests Democrats might not be driven by pure compassion, and this is what your brain responds with. I really do wish you would snap out of this.
 

Trunkage

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Read your own post until you realize the level of lunacy you've reached. Someone suggests Democrats might not be driven by pure compassion, and this is what your brain responds with. I really do wish you would snap out of this.
I mean, it doesn't really matter what they are motivated by. It's what they DO that actually matters

But then, this is more about double standards. You don't hold Trump to the same standard as the Dems and Agema was just pointing this out
 

tstorm823

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You don't hold Trump to the same standard as the Dems and Agema was just pointing this out
Have you ever seen me claim Trump is motivated by care and compassion? Half the time Agema does the "but Trump" defense, there are posts by me treating him with the same standard in the same thread. My biggest point here of the last 8 years is literally that Trump does the same things the Democrats do.
 

Elijin

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Have you ever seen me claim Trump is motivated by care and compassion? Half the time Agema does the "but Trump" defense, there are posts by me treating him with the same standard in the same thread. My biggest point here of the last 8 years is literally that Trump does the same things the Democrats do.
Didn't you just recently spend a page or two claiming he helps his nephew out of care and compassion, in response to others suggesting otherwise?
 

Bedinsis

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Read your own post until you realize the level of lunacy you've reached. Someone suggests Democrats might not be driven by pure compassion, and this is what your brain responds with. I really do wish you would snap out of this.
If you take a gander at what Agema wrote and you quoted he said that "The Democrats are aiming more at people who are motivated more by care and compassion", i.e. that they are going more for the parts of the electorate who feel motivated by care and compassion. No statement was made on whether the Democratic politicians themselves embody these traits.
 
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Agema

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Read your own post until you realize the level of lunacy you've reached. Someone suggests Democrats might not be driven by pure compassion, and this is what your brain responds with. I really do wish you would snap out of this.
Straw man, as Bedinsis pointed out.

There's plenty of psychological research out there about how different personalities or emotional sensitivities tend to affect voting inclination. It is true: Western left-wing parties tend to get more traction expressing and amplifying care and compassion, because it tends to be a higher motivator in their targer voters.

Thirdly, and perhaps understandably, I think you might have missed an element of comic exaggeration in my description of Trump (although appreciate he's so grotesque it's often hard to tell), although my point that he is a non-stop rampage of resentment and also reflects a huge wellspring of right-wing resentment remains.
 

tstorm823

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Didn't you just recently spend a page or two claiming he helps his nephew out of care and compassion, in response to others suggesting otherwise?
Not even a little bit.
It is true: Western left-wing parties tend to get more traction expressing and amplifying care and compassion, because it tends to be a higher motivator in their target voters.
You misspelled pity and resentment again.

This is the paradox that plagues the left wing, this is the question they can't see the answer to, and instead can only conclude it must be something about racism: "why do all those poor people we keep trying to help not vote for us?" They don't want the help. People who work hard and get by on the fruits of their own labor don't want your "compassion", they don't want the government to offer them a hand.

Word roots, you know I love etymology, "Compassion": com- meaning with, passio meaning suffer, "Suffer with". The "with" is necessary. Compassion requires you to understand the experience of another before you can adjoin your feelings to theirs. If you feel bad for someone who doesn't feel bad for themselves, especially impersonally, from a distance, through government programs using the collective population's money, that "with" is sorely missing. It's not compassion, it's just pity. You can feel bad for someone and want to alleviate their burdens and still just be a condescending turd. If your policies are appealing to people who see themselves as compassionate, but they don't actually know the downtrodden people and figure the government can sort it out, they do not deserve the word compassion.

And then obviously you decided to demonstrate the resentment part yourself, I should hardly have to explain that.
 

Elijin

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For someone who frequently uses the shield of "You're really going to paint all these Republicans with the same brush" or "You can't know what all these people think" you are are easily the worst offender on these forums. And blind to your own faults.

Also I can't be assed going back, but you 1000% challenged multiple people here for suggesting Trump was not acting from care and compassion, but out of control/transactional/power/obligation. Believe you called them things like delusional and off the deep end. I'm prepared to accept you probably didn't specifically used the words 'Trump is caring and compassionate' but you outright stated anyone suggesting he wasn't, was mad.

TL;DR
You gave up any pretence of being anything other than a contrarian some time ago, and are losing track of your own bullshit.
 

Bedinsis

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This is the paradox that plagues the left wing, this is the question they can't see the answer to, and instead can only conclude it must be something about racism: "why do all those poor people we keep trying to help not vote for us?" They don't want the help.
In the last election people with lower income were more inclined to vote for Democrats. So evidently the poor people are voting for the Democrats.

Unless you're not calling the Democrats left-wing (a very reasonable position though one I would consider a bit odd coming from you).
 
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Agema

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This is the paradox that plagues the left wing, this is the question they can't see the answer to, and instead can only conclude it must be something about racism: "why do all those poor people we keep trying to help not vote for us?" They don't want the help. People who work hard and get by on the fruits of their own labor don't want your "compassion", they don't want the government to offer them a hand.
Actually, in many ways they do want the government to offer them a hand. They want the government to ensure that they have minimums of housing, food, healthcare, and other necessities. They want the government to ensure infrastructure and safety for them and their communities to thrive, to give them opportunities via education, to protect them from exploitation. The left is lazily characterised as handouts by the right to avoid discussing what the left is often trying to do. It's about giving people a secure foundation and opportunities for people to get work and use that hard work to build themselves up. A labour union is empowering workers to represent themselves without having to get the government involved. One of the reasons the government has had to increasingly intervene directly is the success of the right at shattering the ability of workers to represent themselves effectively.

What we see with the right is all the people who work hard and don't get the fruits of their labour, because the right believes in a system where people with lots of capital and well paid accountants and lawyers get to exploit the living crap out of those who don't.

Compassion requires you to understand the experience of another before you can adjoin your feelings to theirs.
This is just bollocks. I'm sorry, but it's the worst sort of shoddy, semantic sophistry.

By the same logic, I could sit here arguing sycophancy doesn't mean fawning to the powerful, it means demonstrating figs: "sukon" = fig + "pheinein" = to show, as in "Wow, did you that sycophancy at the grocer? Those figs in the window display looked delicious!"

But that would be ginormously idiotic to the max. The meaning of words just are not tied to their etymological root in the way you want to pretend (when it suits you). You should feel embarrassed to clog up threads with such arrant balderdash.
 
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tstorm823

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In the last election people with lower incoming where more inclined to vote for Democrats. So evidently the poor people are voting for the Democrats.

Unless you're not calling the Democrats left-wing (a very reasonable position though one I would consider a bit odd coming from you).
You think a slim majority means they don't want the 46% who voted against them?
 

tstorm823

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Actually, in many ways they do want the government to offer them a hand.
Says you, captain ivory tower, without an ounce of self-awareness.
They want the government to ensure that they have minimums of housing, food, healthcare, and other necessities. They want the government to ensure infrastructure and safety for them and their communities to thrive, to give them opportunities via education, to protect them from exploitation.
Stop, step back, realize the truth: this isn't "they want". This is "you want". You want a society where people have minimums of things, you want a society where people are safe and secure, you want these things for people. And good, you should, those things make for a good, peaceful society. I also want those things. We disagree on the best means to achieve those ends.

If you consider the positions of those left of you, of which there are many here, you can be assured that if they had their way they'd "do more" for the poor and oppressed and then inevitably cause the needless deaths of millions of people. I am sure that you are aware of this. Are they more compassionate for wanting to do more than you? No? Then why do you imagine you are more compassionate than those right of you? Just about everyone wants the best for people in general. Only the delusional think their political lane has a special level of compassion.
This is just bollocks. I'm sorry, but it's the worst sort of shoddy, semantic sophistry.

But that would be ginormously idiotic to the max. The meaning of words just are not tied to their etymological root in the way you want to pretend (when it suits you). You should feel embarrassed to clog up threads with such arrant balderdash.
You're not disputing what I claimed, only the way I claimed it. You know what compassion means, you have no comeback, so you are content to sidestep the issue entirely.
 

Bedinsis

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You think a slim majority means they don't want the 46% who voted against them?
They obviously want everyone. My conclusion from the statistics would be that income isn't the biggest indicator of whom people vote for, true, since it is split rather evenly across income levels. Your conclusion seemed to be that "and therefore these specific policies are unwanted". I don't think there's anything to conclude that. In particular I consider political apathy the biggest factor in determining elections, an apathy borne from a perceived lack of options, a lack of faith in congress to get anything done and a lack of faith in politicians. And the picture I've gotten is that winning the election comes down to getting people to vote, not convincing people whom to vote for, which goes hand in hand with the political apathy being the biggest factor.
 

Agema

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You're not disputing what I claimed, only the way I claimed it. You know what compassion means, you have no comeback, so you are content to sidestep the issue entirely.
This is your typical pathetic and risible rejoinder to when you make pathetic and risible arguments and decide to dig your heels in for no good reason. It wouldn't be so bad, except that this sort of shit has happened dozens of times before and you never learn. The meaning of a word is determined by how people actually use it in real life at the time it was employed. Not some bizarre intellectual confection of what the archaic root of the word means if translated / interpreted in a very specific way - not least because that specific way has inevitably been dishonestly cherry-picked.

Compassion is a widely used word. If you want to know what the conventional understanding of a word is in societal use, that's what a dictionary attempts to represent in its definitions. The general interpretation of "compassion" is feeling bad about someone's suffering plus the desire to provide assistance.

So for instance when a 30-year-old doctor is expected to show compassion to their elderly patient recovering from a hip replacement, it's not an expectation that the doctor age 40 years and have major surgery.
 

Agema

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Says you, captain ivory tower, without an ounce of self-awareness.
Of course people want these things. It's easy to look up polls/surveys and see what people want. Sure, there's all manner of variability, but in terms of general popularity, less affluent people obviously do want to make sure that there's a guaranteed minimum and provision of resources and assistance to help them progress.

Are they more compassionate for wanting to do more than you? No? Then why do you imagine you are more compassionate than those right of you?
Dude, how would I know whether I am more compassionate than other people I've never met and don't know anything about? What a bizarre idea! Where did you dredge that up from - do you think this is some weird sort of boast, that I'm trying to say that I am somehow better than you?

I'm talking about how politicians design messages to most beneficially excite the emotional responses of voters, and why the sorts of messages left and right come out with can be very different.