Apropos of Everything....
 

...and absolutely Nothing...

Tyrone, Less and I met up yesterday - first time the 3 of us have been together in over a decade - had a great lunch and fun conversation. We didn't even discuss politics. Family. Work. Sports. Stuff that matters.

A clear reminder of how personal discourse is civil, the internet is a toxic cesspool, and GA friendships are (mostly) eternal.

SlaveNo(Speaking of cesspool, I'll be in NY all next week. Thurgreed, Pony, Ironweed - call me)More

Re: Hip, Hip, Hip!
 

Triumph is very, very under-rated, but no.

Gwinky may disagree, although I doubt it (and I've forwarded this outrageous comment to Multo), but as The Hip's "Up to Here" came out in 1989...

...The Tragically Hip are THE best (if Rush is out of the equation) Canadian band of the 80's, 90's and Aughts.

SlaveNo("She's young now, she's wild now, she wants to be free, she gets the "Magic Power" of the music from me" sounds a bit Harvey in the #meetoo era - just sayin')More

PS - who did the GA parody of the "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" back in the day? That was epic.

The maples scream “oppression!”
 

I don’t think of the Hip as 1980s rock because I am old.

There is no contest between Triumph and Rush. With the notable exceptions of “Subdivisions” and “Tom Sawyer” (from 1981’s surprisingly Not Shitty “Moving Pictures”), Geddy Lee’s nasally whine makes me want to strangle the nearest faux Libertarian douchetard as he passionately explains how the hour-long* title track to “2112” really opened his eyes, man.

Didn’t Chevy do a lot of the song parodies?

*Whatever. It’s Not Literally an hour, but you know it’s too fucking long, right?

Re: Apropos of Everything....
 

Fo sure. I'm around.

Re: Hip, Hip, Hip!
 

I agree with them but found out too late. One of the few good things the NY Rangers did last year was make "Little Bones" their second period hit-the-ice song.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

You had a prefered outcome, you were just deeply invested in denying it.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

All this thrashing about doesn't hide the fact that you know 90% of what you're saying is garbage. It doesn't matter that you thought your vote wouldn't count. It did. And you, like a bunch of other morons who think a dumbass protest vote is going to change the system, flushed your vote down the toilet and helped elect the worst President any of us has or ever will see.

You think you're clever by couching your stupid action as a vote against the two party system and that you are the opposite side of us, who all value the two party system. This is, of course, complete fucking nonsense. No one exercised their vote to preserve the two party system. You go on and on about your right to vote how you like, like anyone here is talking about what you have and do not have a right to do. Pure rubbish.

We needed everyone to vote to keep a fucking dumbass racist infant from occupying the most powerful office in the world. Either you did or you didn't. That's it. You didn't. There's isn't enough garbage that you can type to distract anyone from that fact.

TM

Re: I'm hoping...
 

Trump has nearly zero impact on my taxes. So if you're asserting I'm a Trump voter in disguise, you're saying I favor his other policies. This would mean you believe I favor:

Racist dog whistles
Anti-immigrant sentiment
Nativism
Protectionism
Climate change denial

I do tend to favor a more isolationist stance and less regulation generally. This is true. But that's about the only place where I find agreement with Trump. And he's already abandoned the isolationist posture.

So, to get this right, you're asserting I wanted a racist, anti-immigrant, nativist, protectionist, anti-environment regime in office?

Am I misunderstanding you here?

Re: I'm hoping...
 

It's not garbage at all. If there's a silver lining to Trump, it's the recognition our political system has collapsed.

But for Trump, we were facing a clash of dynasties: Jeb v. Hillary. How fucking stale was that? What grand new ideas were emerging from that race? Two candidates with similar platforms both invested in punting and pretending everything's great.

Apparently, everything was not great.

This country is cancered. And it was cancered long before Trump's emergence, which is a symptom, not a cause. Let me repeat that, so it can sink in: Trump is a symptom, not a cause. If you hear anyone calling him a cause of the problems in America, stop listening to that person. Leave the conversation. Hell, leave the room. Your IQ can only drop from exposure to that person's views.

I look at Trump as discovery of a stage 2 cancer in our politics, in our society, in our American "culture." You can cure stage 2 cancer most of the time. Stage 3 and 4? Not so curable.

Will Trump do damage? Undoubtably. But of value eclipsing that damage is this: The national compulsion to ask, "How could he happen?" (We're having a lot of conversations about ugly shit we avoided discussing before Trump. A lot of stuff we'd have have avoided in a Jeb or Hillary administration.)

The dimmest wits on this board, and everywhere else, will answer "Why and how Trump?" with "Russia!" Or they'll avoid it entirely, claiming Trump is the disease. Or they'll carp at third party voters, thinking themselves the wise pragmatists in the room.

The smart response to Trump is to ask the tough questions. What caused his emergence? How can we address what caused his emergence? How can we remove the xenophobia, racism, and delusion behind it? (I do not think we can credibly address the economic fears behind it.) And how have we possibly enabled it through social and traditional media, cultural polarization and information "siloing"?

I do not think 90% of what I've written on this topic is garbage. Not in the least. Occasionally, you have read my mind. Here, you couldn't be more inaccurate.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

No, I'm asserting that your professed policy preferences lined up significantly more with Clinton than you were ever willing to admit to yourself.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

Disagree. But we'll get to that later.

I'm really very sick of this bullshit. Those two candidates are not the same. Jeb would have pushed a lot of the same policy that is currently being passed by an all-Republican Congress based on pleasing the rich with massive tax cuts, reduction of government, gutting of regulation, and laws aimed at depriving gays and people of color as many rights as possible. Hillary would not.

You keep stating that things are bad and would have remained bad for people in this country like it is a product of our political system. You need to stop. Things are bad because of runaway capitalism. You are right that globalization and automation is taking a real toll. But the fact that you constantly argue that people are hurting because the two party system is so invested in maintaining the trend of reducing workforce is absolutely insanity. The government reacts to our economic realities. It doesn't set them. So if one side is desperately trying to help the country adjust and progress to help mitigate those realities and the other is trying desperately to pretend they don't exist by shutting us off from the world, protecting jobs in dying industries while failing to invest in the ones that will carry us forward, and using racism, homophobia, and xenophobia to accomplish it, you need to acknowledge that difference.

Stop setting up stupid fucking strawmen to knock down. No one is interested in this game.

The amount of damage this asshole has done to this country in one fucking year with the help of a willing Republican legislative body will take 30 to 50 years to undo.

No. This is what you love to do: You take one piece of the puzzle out and point at it and say, "Anyone who blames this is stupid." NO ONE does this.

Everyone on this board understands that what happened in 2016 is unprecedented. The causes are many--among them, Comey acting the fool, Russia undermining our entire system, the natural, racist swing in the opposite direction from a smart, black President, idiots like you voting third party in a very close and important election, social media, Fox News garbage, bullshit Republican hit-job Hillary investigations, etc. You need to admit to yourself that people like you contributed to the problem by not voting to keep a lunatic out of office. What happened doesn't land completely on you. But you and everyone else who voted third party sure played your part.

Who is this "we" of which you speak? There is one party that is interested in institutionalizing and codifying those things. There is one party that is interested in using all of those things as motivation to get people to the voting booth. We are reaping what that party has sown for political purposes for the last 50 years.

How do we solve it? Get one party to stop feeding, cultivating, and taking advantage of it? Maybe get them to actually protect our system of democracy from foreign attacks instead of letting the President intentionally fail to act because it currently favors them?

Politics sucks. And both parties have their issues. But there is only one party willing to destroy everything we have valued about this country just so they can remain in power.

TM

Re: I'm hoping...
 

Agree that asking tough questions is not a bad thing, but I'm more impressed with good answers.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

You're not going to flag me for "undoubtably"? You're slipping.

I must insult myself. That's near illiterate.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

Sebby, Thurgreed here is moving into an argument the hypothetical R candidate BT (before trump) was not the same thing as Hil. I don't take that step. i actually got people who said the two parties don't really get anywhere different. Of course there are different minor steps in one direction or the other. Jeb v. Hil would have been a much different question for me, and I would have understood people going third party.

For that matter people of our age learned something in 2000. That electoral college thing matters. The only person still posting here whose vote actually matters is B&B. NY, Cali, Texas, Mi and Pa., we always go blue (except Texas which is always red). Every vote in your life, and mine, was meaningless. but for once it did, and you and i knew it.

And it wasn't Jeb v. Hil.

Re: I'm hoping...
 

His father raised taxes and lost as a result. Jeb was a moderate, including on social issues.

Every GOP Congress tries to cut taxes and reduce govt. I'm not sure the first is wise, as it's always aimed to favor the top 1%. But reducing govt is a good thing.

Expanding safety nets and the fantasy of retraining obsolete workers are no fixes at all. Nearly as useless and counter-productive as protectionism.

Replacing safety nets and their administrative components with universal basic income, making the economic arguments for a single payer system (which are strong), and taxing rentier capitalists would good starts. Hillary was only planning to do the second. The first is anathema to any Democrat because it eliminates govt jobs. The third would piss off the people who fill her campaign coffers -- her owners.

That's a brash prediction. I think you'll be surprised how fast a subsequent administration can reverse the damage.
This kind of critique I can accept. Hank's "It's all on the third party voters!" shtick was getting old because it counters the facts you just cited. And yet he kept pummeling that dead horse...

All very reasonable. Similarly reasonable is to tell the other party to stop promising to take care of everybody in exchange for votes. Govt has limits.

The Trump Movement doesn't see it that way. They really believe they are saving the country's essential character. I thought it was all a posture by Congress to placate the base. Now I'm beginning to think it's contagious, and Congress has actually bought into the nativist message.