Union contract.
Not to derail the thread into a theological discussion, but it’s clear in Scripture - both Old and New Testament - that God is a god of violence, wrath and destruction aplenty. He commanded genocide of the Amalekites, commanded the death penalty even merely for someone gathering firewood sticks on the Sabbath, ordered sons to be stoned to death if they rebelled against their parents, struck two believers dead for lying (Ananias and Sapphira,) says that most people are headed for destruction while only few are on the path to life, killed all firstborns in Egypt, killed thousands of Israelites because David ordered a census of the fighting men in Israel, and flooded the Earth, killing everyone in the world save eight.
God as portrayed in the Bible is NOT a suburban Kumbaya God.
So are you just going to leave that turd you dropped lying there? No effort to defend that?
Or are you a gutless coward?
We all know most Christians care more about what their church says than what the Bible actually says. Even the literalists pick and choose convenient part of the texts and then declare that they’re authoritative.
I got shit to do today and a swinger party later. So I’m going to leave it there for now, maybe later this week sparky.
From my short time here I’m assuming you hate Trump, so you can chew on this for now - I’d recommend little bites so you don’t choke.
In other words - gutless coward who cannot back up his “both sides bad” bullshit.
Sure buddy. Both media bad.
The right media was spinning absolute bullshit and lies about a “stolen election”, fraudulent ballots, and more stuff that was not only wrong, but completely made up crap; while those just-as-bad lefties were calling out those lies and publishing factual information, which cause the right to have their feelings hurt.
Boo hoo, can’t hurt the feelings of the right wing. That’s just as bad as publishing lies that led to an unhinged mob storming the capitol building to kidnap and/or murder politicians who were following the constitution.
Welcome to the SDMB! Here’s hoping your time here is short, you disingenuous piece of crap.
Oh heavens! CNN is considered left of center? Time to reconsider everything I know!
Fuck off.
I’d reply, but I’m pretty busy banging my supermodel girlfriend. Then I have to go pickup my Bugatti Veyron from the shop and take it for a spin. Then I’ll be superbusy organizing my Nobel prizes. Sorry I can’t respond.
What exactly are trying to show with that link? That CNN commentary leans towards the left? Without getting into what is left and right, I don’t think this at all supports your position. To demonstrate partisanship, their primary example was:
For example, during the 2016 Presidential Election Pew Research concluded that the majority of CNN stories covering President Donald Trump were negative.
I can’t think of much of Trump’s 2016 campaign that should have been positive.
Here is the overall rating of CNN, which is probably more positive then I would rate any 24 hour news channel:
Overall, we rate CNN left biased based on editorial positions that consistently favors the left, while straight news reporting falls left-center through bias by omission. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to several failed fact checks by TV hosts. However, news reporting on the website tends to be properly sourced with minimal failed fact checks
And I think this directly contradicts your point about both sides being at fault:
They have been inaccurately characterized as being fake news by President Trump and many of his supporters.
Nobody is pitting Schwarzenegger, who is still a registered Republican.
~Max
Since we are in the Pit, I’m going to post a slightly re-edited version of something I posted in another thread.
I agree that the “mainstream media” did not cover Trump fairly. When a conman that ran a criminal organization got elected to the highest office in the land, they were required to show at least a modicum of respect for the office, if not the man.
We had to meet the other side halfway down the rabbit hole in order to be “fair”.
After a few years of relentless gaslighting, we were required to make “both sides” arguments for the most ridiculous things. “Is it OK for a President to extort a foreign leader?” “Is my opponent, one of the most senior statesmen in the country, really a corrupt agent of the Chinese? When we got to “Who really won the election?”, it seemed normal.
Everything the President did that “was not technically illegal” was up for debate, even if the reason it was not technically illegal came down to a failure of imagination. We didn’t have a law preventing Trump from withholding foreign aid to pressure their leader for corrupt personal favor because we didn’t envision needing one, not because we thought it was OK.
I intended this to be an intro to the piece I posted in another thread yesterday but it got way long. Anyway, here’s the piece.
WARNING : This post contains crude and possibly disturbing imagery*
Everyone is talking about what we can all do to mend the widening division in this country and it’s boring me to tears. Quit intellectualizing this, the answer is simple.
Let me start with an analogy.
I’m sure, somewhere in the darkness of the Internet there are pictures of people that insert incredibly large objects into their anal orifices. I’ve never seen such pictures. I imagine it hurts to look at them. Many may wonder how such a thing is possible. But you have to understand that those …actors…didn’t get there all at once.
Maybe they started with a Q-tip, like watching Fox News in its early years. And that little lie, a hint of the worldview in which they mattered more than their bosses with their college degrees, it felt good. And the lies got bigger, maybe pencil-sized, and that felt even better.
But at a point Fox News stopped. But they had an audience of people with carrots up their butts that wanted to feel something more. So free markets filled that void. And as some Republican buttholes expanded, so did the selection of media outlets that wanted to stretch them wide with the world where they were the only people that mattered. So they were primed when Trump took office.
There were so many lies and so many increasingly large objects being stuck up some Republican buttholes in the Trump Era, but these are the highlights.
That first lie, the one about the size of his inauguration, was the pencil.
His false protestations of innocence in RussiaGate was the carrot
The Zelensky phone call impeachment was the beer can
Then Trump lost the election and greased up the watermelon. And his fans took it, that big greasy watermelon in the butt sized lie, and they liked it. Because they’d been groomed, it felt comfortable.
But those Republicans didn’t just get up one morning and say - “I think I’ll grease up a watermelon and stick it up my butt today. They have to be groomed to do that. They have to be primed. It helps if they spend their days around other people that stick big greasy watermelons up their butt. It normalizes it.
But, in polite society, people don’t like people that walk around with big greasy watermelons stuck up their butts, and sometimes they don’t want someone with a big greasy watermelon up their butt to be their friend or work for them. No one wants to listen to you when you have a big greasy watermelon up your butt.
Stop complaining about Big Tech and de-platforming and shadow-banning and cancel culture. Stop complaining about haters and bigots. Stop acting so…butthurt…all the time.
You want a good job or nice friends or the ability to shop and walk through an airport in peace…
TAKE THE BIG GREASY WATERMELON OUT OF YOUR BUTT! STOP STICKING BIG GREASY LIES UP YOUR BUTT!
It’s very simple.
We aren’t shunning you because of your race or religion. We aren’t shunning you because you live in the country or lack fashion sense. We aren’t even shunning you for your political beliefs, your views on tax policy or immigration. There’s only one thing dividing the country and it’s that some of us have big greasy watermelons stuck up our butts. People on one side only. But you can take them out.
Let me repeat. We are shunning you because you insist on believing those watermelon-sized lies that you stick up your butt. It’s not normal. Stop doing that and you can re-enter polite society. But not until then.
And that proves what, MAGAloser? Be specific.
This forum topic is a good example of Godwin’s law.
Seriously, why even bother replying to such nonsense? He’s barely making an effort, lol
Godwin’s law was an interesting idea in 1995 but it really hasn’t aged well and, contrary to popular opinion, it was never intended to be a rule against criticizing conservatives.
The word from God 
, as in Mike Godwin, the one that made that “law” : about the Chancellorsville fascists protesters that killed a woman then:
By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.
His point, as it is clear with also with the insurrection ones of recent news, is that his law is being misused when attempting to dismiss others when the compassion to Nazis is relevant and proper.
The “mainstream media” and particularly 24 cable news, e.g. CNN, MSNBC, and the like do bear some degree in responsibility in terms of the free coverage they gave to candidate Donald Trump before the 2016 election (in comparison to every other Republican candidate, and in fact, to the Democratic candidates as well), and since the election their round-the-clock coverage of his meaningless shit-tweets, political infighting among his advisors and Cabinet members, and general attention to superficial but ratings-grabbing spectacle over the more concerning and worrisome activities of his Cabinet members behind the scenes. The day the entire media establishment focused on trying to parse some actual meeting over the butt-tweet of “Covfefe” was the day it was apparent that they all lost their damned minds, or at least their journalistic sensibilities in favor getting views, selling advertising space, and engaging in wanton speculation over what message this was conveying to whom when it was readily apparent it was just a typo.
Of course, this doesn’t compare to Fox News which is a Rupert Murdock’s dedicated conservative propaganda machine, or OANN, InfoWars, and similar sites that were essentially conduits for fake conspiracy theories being trolled around by Russian intelligence. The “mainstream media” were just clueless dopes maximizing their ad revenue without consideration for whose agenda they were satisfying, while Fox and OANN knew exactly what they were trying to achieve.
Stranger
Schwarzenegger deliberately made and distributed a video calling out Republican politics and media for enabling traitors.
IMO if there’s a way for the Republican Party to survive at all as a rational participant in functional democracy and the rule of law, that’s it. Namely, be honest about the damage your party has done, and pledge to retrieve it by committing to acknowledgement of facts and the principles of public service in bipartisan politics, rather than treating your political adversaries as enemies who must be destroyed by any means fair or foul.
Schwarzenegger has been a good Republican – I don’t care. There’s just no use for the party anymore. The best thing he could do is to help destroy the party that he helped enable over the years. I’d acknowledge he in no way intended to enable what it became, and I’d acknowledge he’s not the only Republican who’s fighting the good fight. But the party cannot be salvaged. The damage too great. The patriotic thing isn’t to reform the party, but to leave it and run as independents until the rats are gone.