Hillary Clinton

Scrotes, I retract my previous statements. Somehow you had managed to convince me that you weren't completely off your rocker. Well, you just invited me into your house where I can see that rocker. Not only is it empty, but it's covered in a two-inch layer of dust and, unlike Trump, hasn't felt an ass in years.

Your comprehension of reality is compromised. I say we need to de-radicalize these people, and you apparently hear something so crazy and outlandish that I can't even untangle it. What are these "pervasive attacks on the First Amendment" you're talking about? As far as I can tell, only Trump has argued that the first amendment needs to be loosened so he can personally sue reporters for reporting facts Trump doesn't like. I say we need to help bring these people back to reality, and your brain fabricates an alternate reality where I say they need to be silenced? What the fuck, man? At least have the decency to be ashamed of these irrational leaps of yours.

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What does scare me is this recent rejection of difference of opinion, the idea that people aren't merely wrong but must be stopped.

You're scared by the fact that some people want an educated, intelligent populace with beliefs founded in reality, and want to convert the dangerously uninformed and delusional into sound-minded citizens capable of making rational decisions? OH SHIT! THE LIBRULS ARE COMING FOR OUR CONSPIRACIES! MAW, PAW, HIDE YOUR INFOWARS!

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You say my party is fucked. I say it's far less fucked than yours. Sit back and enjoy The Purge.

I think you finally managed to convince me that not one single Trumper has a jot of rationality floating around inside their heads. Congratulations.

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Jennik wrote:

You're scared by the fact that some people want an educated, intelligent populace with beliefs founded in reality, and want to convert the dangerously uninformed and delusional into sound-minded citizens capable of making rational decisions?

No, that would be you.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599

And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.

> No, that would be you.

Wait, am I the guy who sent Podesta that email? Holy shit, I never knew! Why did my mom never tell me?!

Listen, Trumpty, this might be hard for you to wrap your noggin around, but things aren't true simply because someone emailed them to John Podesta. Please try to understand that. Linking to an email on Wikileaks is not a substitute for a rational argument. Pointing out that one human being holds a belief does not mean that belief is factual, nor does it mean that belief is common.

I don't care what one man who emailed John Podesta believes, and I have no fucking clue why you believe the fact that this one man believes it is even remotely important, much less a valid argument in and of itself.

Without doing research, answer these questions (and I'm not looking for a reply to any of these, this is for your personal benefit):

1) Who is Bill Ivey?

2) Why is his opinion so important that you feel the need to present it as if it's a rock-solid argument?

3) How have you not realized how ridiculous what you're doing is before now?

4) What else do you think about in such clearly outlandish, blind, and outright childishly simplistic ways?

https://imgur.com/a/0M3ny

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Jennik wrote:

What are these "pervasive attacks on the First Amendment" you're talking about? As far as I can tell, only Trump has argued that the first amendment needs to be loosened so he can personally sue reporters for reporting facts Trump doesn't like.

Obama seeks to "curate" untrue information from the internet, assures us it isn't censorship, and Daily Banter agrees

Refusing to acknowledge transgender pronouns criminalized in New York City

Professors walk on eggshells as virtually anything they say can constitute a sexual harassment charge

Current university culture may lead to offending people being criminalized in the future

I maybe should have emphasized that these are mostly cultural attacks on free speech, not legal ones (or the direct threat thereof). But politics is downstream from culture. At some point soon, this batch of college students will come into their own as a constituency, and when they do, that's what I meant I was afraid of.

I'm against buffing libel law, by the way; Trump's dead wrong on that one.

Edit: The one thing all of these attacks on free speech have in common is: they allege that certain forms of speech are incorrect, either factually or ethically. Whatever happened to the idea that even a completely insane Nazi bastard is protected by the First Amendment? As I said earlier, the First Amendment is under enough attack (culturally) that I feel strangely compelled to (culturally) defend one's constitutional right to be wrong.

<Non sequiturs snipped>

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Jennik wrote:

1) Who is Bill Ivey?

2) Why is his opinion so important that you feel the need to present it as if it's a rock-solid argument?

#1 and #2 are related. How so? They are related by being part of the inner circle that helps Clinton make her decisions. Ivey may be a low level source of information, or a high level analyst. Clinton is very much someone who does things by committee, and the members of that committee matter.

It is like seeing a "GGG" tag on the Path of Exile forum. Who is XXX_XX@GGG and why does their post matter? Their post matters because it is the post of an official GGG employee.

The GGG post might not be game related such as the sharing of an opinion on favorite movies or anime. In many posts and most sections of the forum, the posts do represent an official position of GGG.

While we can't say that all the Podesta emails (or the new DNC ones) represent official positions, we can say that collectively, they represent the consensus opinion that largely guides the Clinton machine.

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As for who he actually is - he was the chairman of an federal government agency (1998-2001) with a hundred million dollar budget, and he was appointed by Bill Clinton. The agency was the National Endowment for the Arts - so you can see that his job position directly relates to what was quoted in the email, that he is connected to the Clintons and did have an official government leadership/policy making position.

Your questioning of Bill Ivey and why is his opinion so important would be like someone who wasn't familiar with Path of Exile posting: "Who is Edwin McRae and why do you think his opinion on Path of Exile is so important that ..."

Context matters. Having factual information matters. Doing a modicum of research on a disputed subject before acting like an expert matters.

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On a different note - I do hope that everyone who is registered and hasn't already votes gets out and votes tomorrow.

Whether our collective decision ends up being the correct one is not as important as the fact that it is still OUR decision. If we don't show up and vote, we let other people make those decisions for us.

Scrotes, you pride yourself on being above bullshit and propaganda, and you link that absurd story from the New York fucking Post? That's just plain hilarious. They take a tiny nugget of truth and misrepresent it in the most ridiculous of ways to craft sensationalist nonsense, which is what that article clearly is. Get outta here with $250,000 fines for not calling someone "ze!"

You're also completely misrepresenting the fact that a very vocal and very, very minuscule minority are overly thin-skinned as "pervasive attacks on the First Amendment." It's just people being douches, which we find in every single aspect of life. There is no sane or rational reason to worry about losing your freedom of speech over this.

Also, understand that people having free speech doesn't mean they can freely speak anywhere. That has never been a thing. I'm all for some sort of standards on the Internet, though the Internet would have to change massively for that to happen. I fear we've already lost a significant portion of our youth to garbage like Breitbart and Infowars.

If you honestly don't understand the concern with having a population that is massively uninformed to the point that their view of reality is the polar opposite of actual reality, though, there's clearly no worthwhile conversation for us to have. When climate change is probably the biggest issue facing humanity today and most of one political party including their candidate for president doesn't even accept that it's happening, there's a serious fucking problem. This ignorance and idiocy will literally kill us if left unchecked.

And go vote for Hillary, everybody! She's pretty awesome when you get past all the bullshit the right's been throwing at her for decades. Here's to eight more years of D in office, and don't forget to vote D down ballot! We really need to get rid of that GOP obstructionism so Hillary can get things done.

DL, I was asking him those questions to try to get him to understand that you can't simply use the fact that one man's opinion is in an email on Wikileaks as a factual argument about reality. Appleguy was giving a tremendous amount of undue weight to this email for some reason.

Who the guy is doesn't actually matter, nor does his opinion, and posting a link to that email in lieu of an actual argument was absurd.

Edit: Just in case you still don't get my argument:

Imagine two people, one Democrat and one Republican. Both have resumes very similar to Ivey's. Both of them have beliefs that are basically polar opposites of the other's. Imagine one of them sends an email to Podesta, much like the one linked earlier in this thread, which is then leaked to Wikileaks. Along comes Appleguy, who posts that link in a thread much like this one, and presents the email's contents as if they're actual fact.

Are the contents of the email a true and accurate statement about reality? Possibly. There are two guys who have opposing beliefs, though, so at least one is wrong. Plus, that still doesn't mean one is actually right. Posting either email as if it's a factual statement about reality would be ridiculous.

There are many other ways to look at this issue to see that what Appleguy did was ridiculous, but hopefully this was clear enough to make my point obvious.

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Jennik wrote:

DL, I was asking him those questions to try to get him to understand that you can't simply use the fact that one man's opinion is in an email on Wikileaks as a factual argument about reality. Appleguy was giving a tremendous amount of undue weight to this email for some reason.

Who the guy is doesn't actually matter, nor does his opinion, and posting a link to that email in lieu of an actual argument was absurd.

A lot of the emails are indeed just buzzing noise, and don't matter at all. I don't think Clinton's committee method is inherently wrong - in fact it is probably good to have an ongoing open discussion of the pros and cons of various issues before deciding on them.

Where Hillary went wrong - was having all this stuff (not the campaign strategy stuff - but policy position stuff) secret. If Hillary's team had been more open about what they were talking about and thinking, they would have had a lot of feedback from supporters - and from opponents, and they could have analyzed that feedback and come up with an even stronger policy and strategy.

And the public would likely be behind Hillary 85% if she had done so. I have zero problems supporting what the majority of an accurately informed public wants. I may not agree with it all, but I agree with the system.

To my mind, the vote between the two is as much about whether that system has been seriously broken or whether the system is still working fine, as the vote is about which one we dislike less.

I find it amusing that the Left-leaners are all hysterical and abusive in their refutations. The good, old "New Civility." It's the paradigm under which a Clinton administration would (and has already)operate. =^[.]^=