US 2024 Presidential Election

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tippy2k2

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Everyone...I have some shocking news for you. I suggest you sit down and brace yourself before you continue reading. This is bonkers news...


I think Trump might have done some bad stuff involving Epstein and young girls...
 
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thebobmaster

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Not true. White House press secretary has said that the emails prove nothing and are fake news.


Specifically, this update at 10:50.


Email release 'manufactured hoax' by Democrats, says press secretary


Leavitt accuses the Democrats of creating a "manufactured hoax" by releasing some of the Epstein documents this morning ahead of the House returning.

She says it was "not a coincidence" that they had been released on Wednesday.

The press secretary claims Democrats did not care about the Epstein files while President Joe Biden was in office, and instead: "They care about trying to score political points against President Trump."

She adds that the administration is committed to transparency on the issue.
 
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thebobmaster

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I do not trust them to tell the truth.
That is obvious. They have literally every reason to lie, and even if they were being honest, I "love" how their response was basically "No one cared while Biden was president." Even though they DID, and those investigating were doing everything in their power to suppress things.
 
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tstorm823

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If you want to used a specialised and non-obvious meaning of a word, it is your responsibility to clearly define what you mean by it... preferably in advance. If you didn't do that, were you acting in good faith you would apologise for accidentally misleading others when it's pointed out to you.
You brought that term into this current conversation and I explained the distinction. That seems a perfectly reasonable interaction. If we don't reach perfect understanding on first pass and need a back and forth to clarify, that seems fine to me, not something to feel guilty about and apologize.
 

Silvanus

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Did you just google the early pride movement and write down the names you saw, assuming it would work out?
I am a queer person with a HE degree in modern history. Keep your condescension to yourself; these people are well known.

What writings are you referring to? The fame is for saying "gay pride", "fight repression of erotic expression", and then pieing people in the face. I'm not certain the "writings" you reference even exist, as though those two were putting out philosophical treatises about their movement to find out precisely what the word pride meant to them in that time.
I'm not sure why you're using quotation marks for "writings", as I didn't use that word. That would indeed imply essays or somesuch. I used "words", which implies statements, interviews, speeches. All of which they gave, several of which are publicly available. Early 70s gay pride pamphlets and leaflets are also available in museum catalogues, incl. online.

You won't find guff about being "more important" than straight people.

Now, the "more important" is only a logical implication, not a statement. I know you won't appreciate the rhetorical ideas, so I'll skip straight to the conclusive test:

If someone declares pride in their heterosexuality, do you think they believe themselves above others?

You may not admit it to me, but you're thinking yes. You're imagining the type of person to say "straight pride" or "white pride", and you know inside that person is a bigot. I'm not disagreeing, that person is a troll and/or a bigot. Pride in the usage of gay pride may be seen as a statement of equality by many, you see it as comfort in identity, it's ultimately saying "we are just as good as you!" But the "you" is the person who would say "straight pride", the equality is relative to the bigot who looks down on others who are not like them. The consequence of this is an entire subculture that sees itself as fighting against repression and for equality, but increasingly looking down on anyone who isn't like them. Cause marching down the street in silly costumes to make political statements about your in-group isn't what most straight people do, that's the KKK.
This whole paragraph is an exercise in how ignoring relevant context can twist meaning, into strange interpretations the speaker wouldn't even recognise. Its sheer sophistry.

But no: context matters. Those who tend to use phrases such as "white pride" and "straight pride" in the US and western Europe are talking about groups that have not been subjected to stigma, shame and widespread suppression in those places. As such those phrases have tended to be employed mostly by supremacists or conspiracy theorists, as they are the ones who have felt the need to emphasise those specific traits.

Whereas other groups have been subjected to that stigma, shame and widespread suppression on the basis of their innate characteristics. Hence the need for an antidote to shame-- as pride has been seen, ever since the early 70s.

Your little false equivalence above is no more meaningful than arguing that since a murderer might say they're "happy" after killing someone, therefore "happiness" is a gross and untoward thing to feel.
 
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Schadrach

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It's arguably worse than that: via presidential pardons (and assuming they stay in the president's good books), the entire executive branch is immune to the law.
Yeah, but he only mentioned jailing Trump, so the rest of them weren't relevant to the response.

She adds that the administration is committed to transparency on the issue.
If they were committed to transparency, they would have released them 9 months ago. And we wouldn't have had the cell block "raw footage" that definitely wasn't raw footage and desperately makes me want to see if one can FOIA footage from the same camera for a specific other date and time for comparison (when the metadata suggests the footage was actually from).
 
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The Rogue Wolf

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Trump's sole interest in releasing the Epstein files was the hopes that he could get a lot of Democrats put in prison. I think he was told how heavily he's featured in them, shit himself and immediately pivoted to "they're not important" / "it's all a hoax".
 
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tstorm823

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But no: context matters. Those who tend to use phrases such as "white pride" and "straight pride" in the US and western Europe are talking about groups that have not been subjected to stigma, shame and widespread suppression in those places. As such those phrases have tended to be employed mostly by supremacists or conspiracy theorists, as they are the ones who have felt the need to emphasise those specific traits.

Whereas other groups have been subjected to that stigma, shame and widespread suppression on the basis of their innate characteristics. Hence the need for an antidote to shame-- as pride has been seen, ever since the early 70s.
Obviously, I don't agree with a lot of that characterization, but even within that historical framework, you're missing the point. In that situation, where people are shamed and stigmatized and suppressed, who in society is doing the shaming and the suppressing? The proud and the powerful. The movements that embraced these terms were not those who just wanted to be themselves and be comfortable, it was the people going "Nah, it's our turn now! We're going to be proud, and we're going to take the power!" There were other movements that were the sort you might describe, but they weren't touting their pride. In the US, it was a very east vs west split. The east did like Martin Luthor King Jr, they put on their Sunday best and plead to be treated like anyone else. The west was more Black Panthers, taking a "screw you, you can't mess with us, we're gonna do what we want where we want" attitude. That's where Pride comes from. Combining the two ideas as though one meant the other creates a false and self-conflicting history.
 

meiam

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Trump's sole interest in releasing the Epstein files was the hopes that he could get a lot of Democrats put in prison. I think he was told how heavily he's featured in them, shit himself and immediately pivoted to "they're not important" / "it's all a hoax".
I don't think Trump started that train running, I think it was more the religious right that realize that it really wasn't a good optic that so many of them turned out to be pedophile, so they tried to use the famous ''Nuh Huh, you're the pedophile'' and claim that everybody they hated were pedo. The base loved it, cause then they don't gave to feel any shame for supporting pedo, so they pushed hard for it and started creating all kind of crazy conspiracy (pizzagate). Epstein stuff happened around that time so that got mixed in. Unfortunately for them, they didn`t think that their champion at the moment was a pedo, so now they have to awkwardly backpedal on that one.

I think Trump just got sweep up in all that and just love to give the crowd what they want, I don't think he understand that raping underage women is bad, so he never even realize that if it came out he could get in trouble. Once in power, somebody loyal to him probably went trough those file and realized what was in them and told him to downplay everything.

Anyway, I don't see how them being release would do anything, for one they'll probably be heavily redacted to remove any mention of Trump while highlighting anything that involves people he doesn't like. For another, his base is in too deep at this point, they can't not support him, they'll always double down. The only way they'll admit that Trump raping underage women is if they also somehow can spin it into a positive thing, otherwise they'll just claim its all fake, it'll be in the media for a couple of day, Trump will do something stupid and then the media circus will move on.
 

Silvanus

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Obviously, I don't agree with a lot of that characterization, but even within that historical framework, you're missing the point. In that situation, where people are shamed and stigmatized and suppressed, who in society is doing the shaming and the suppressing? The proud and the powerful. The movements that embraced these terms were not those who just wanted to be themselves and be comfortable, it was the people going "Nah, it's our turn now! We're going to be proud, and we're going to take the power!"
You claim that's what these people meant when they used the word 'pride'. But all this still relies on your assumption that they were using the word in the way you do. You have nothing else to point to, which leaves your reasoning circular.

Because they were, very clearly, talking about demanding equal treatment, human rights, basic dignity and respect. Examples of that messaging and those demands are abundant-- go read Peter Tatchell's recollections of the first UK pride. Not "more important". You cannot find a single instance of that.

You say i "miss the point" of pride. Yet you're looking at this as someone who has never engaged with it, who isn't part of the community, and who expresses a prejudicial dislike. Whereas i've actually been in LGBT societies for years, been to pride multiple times, including over a decade ago. You miss the point. And you're totally unwilling to actually listen to people who know more about it than you. Its total, unwarranted arrogance.
 
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thebobmaster

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You claim that's what these people meant when they used the word 'pride'. But all this still relies on your assumption that they were using the word in the way you do. You have nothing else to point to, which leaves your reasoning circular.

Because they were, very clearly, talking about demanding equal treatment, human rights, basic dignity and respect. Examples of that messaging and those demands are abundant-- go read Peter Tatchell's recollections of the first UK pride. Not "more important". You cannot find a single instance of that.

You say i "miss the point" of pride. Yet you're looking at this as someone who has never engaged with it, who isn't part of the community, and who expresses a prejudicial dislike. Whereas i've actually been in LGBT societies for years, been to pride multiple times, including over a decade ago. You miss the point. And you're totally unwilling to actually listen to people who know more about it than you. Its total, unwarranted arrogance.
The real life Fantastic from Fallout: New Vegas. "They asked me if I had a degree in theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics, and they said 'Welcome aboard!'"
 
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tstorm823

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But all this still relies on your assumption that they were using the word in the way you do.
You mean the actual meaning of the word, so yes, it does rely on them using the word for its meaning, and not some soft, whitewashing nonsense from half a century later. These groups were actively fighting police in the streets, and your theory is that their rhetorical intention was just to express a comfort with themselves. You shame them with that take.
 

Silvanus

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You mean the actual meaning of the word, so yes, it does rely on them using the word for its meaning, and not some soft, whitewashing nonsense from half a century later.
Back to pure semantics, then-- presumably because you can find nothing that doesn't rely entirely on your interpretation of that single word. No actual detailed demands or other descriptions that match up with it... Odd, that, considering that many and varied calls for equality, human rights, and basic respect survive.

But to address the semantic. That isn't how the term is used or understood. Not then in the 70s, and not now. Uses of the term in the sense I describe are extremely easy to find, throughout popular culture as well as directly relevant writing and words.

In fact, the web Archive has plenty of dictionaries from decades past... here's Oxford American Dictionary from 1980:

""Pride. n. 1 . a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in one’s actions or qualities or possessions etc. 2. a person or thing that is a source of pride. 3. a proper sense of what is fitting for one’s position or character, self-respect. 4. unduly high opinion of one’s own qualities or merits.""

Hm. Guess that "soft" understanding isn't from the last decade after all, eh?

These groups were actively fighting police in the streets, and your theory is that their rhetorical intention was just to express a comfort with themselves. You shame them with that take.
To be blunt: you have absolutely no damn clue what gay people attending pride want, and what they would find "shameful". Your narrow ignorance shines through whenever you write about it.

I've actually been. As part of multiple groups, over multiple years. I am telling you how it was understood by us. And you, from the perspective of someone who has never engaged and expresses only disdain, are dismissing it. Develop a shred of humility.
 

thebobmaster

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That's because it isn't. Not even in Georgia, which Megyn Kelly "represents". Age of consent there is 16.
 

tstorm823

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I am telling you how it was understood by us.
Yes, but your understanding is the one that you want in your mind rather than the one you perceive, and it makes your view of the whole world a disjointed mess that makes no sense, where all the puzzle pieces are too warped and damaged to fit back together. You do not have to take my word for anything, you can set aside the understanding of things that you want now and look at the past and see how the original piece fit into the whole.
 

tstorm823

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I'm not great at math but I'm pretty sure 15 isn't "barely legal"
I wish the age range and circumstances were mentioned more often though, because people get this really abstract idea of an island of child sex trafficking that doesn't involve them, where I think just about everyone has seen someone at some point take sexual advantage of high schoolers or at least express a desire to (and of course the mountain of representation in media that subject gets), and associating that sort of behavior with Epstein might push people to understand the seriousness of that issue.