The death of Hitler certainly made the world a better place.
He’s 100% correct: in a sense, this is, for now, just a bluff. But there could be a point at which a bluff becomes a winning hand if it’s not called in time.
For the record, I don’t necessarily think Trump wins with the hand he’s got – Trump doesn’t win per se. But Trumpism, right wing authoritarianism, is watching this as a kind of simulation game, and they are studying the outcomes big time. There is not a doubt in my mind about that. There is not a doubt in my mind that there are probably hundreds of little Trump wannabes out there who are looking at this and thinking of ways to build on what he’s achieved so far.
And how could they build? Their first tactic will be to make sure that Biden fails - miserably. Create a crisis. Because crisis creates the kind of despair that makes people doubt that their vote even matters. It creates a thirst for a superman or a group of supermen.
Mnuchin is doing his bit to make sure the Biden administration doesn’t have it easy.
By asking the Fed to return unused funds, Mr. Mnuchin could prevent Mr. Biden’s incoming Treasury secretary from quickly restarting the efforts at scale in 2021.
As is McConnell.
Seems that the weak point is in the archaic mechanics of the process. The way I read it:
The electors meet with the state governor and create a document that lists their votes
The document is placed in an envelope and sealed
The envelope is sent to the VP
On a set date the envelopes are opened, by the VP, in front of congress and the results announced
So if a second envelope is submitted and accepted by the VP in place of the official one, Trump could, following the legal process, be declared winner. The response to objections is that Biden can have his day in court. The Trump administration then refuses to participate in any procedures and forbids anyone else from participating with the courts. It is well established that he can do so.
It may be that this is the WH dinner conversation. Just submit another envelope.
A dark and fictional place is right.
Anyone who is comforting themselves by saying “Well it’s obvious bullshit” is underestimating the power of the lie. The South’s lost cause is a lie that survives to this day. The Dreyfus Affair was a lie that bitterly divided France. These lies can become powerful creation myths that narrate a dangerous “us versus them” fiction that people end up buying lock, stock, and barrel.
Question on that. Does that include the PPP loan forgiveness, or have those funds already been considered “spent” when they were disbursed.
As much issue as I see with applying for the forgiveness that many small businesses are having already, if those funds aren’t there for when they finally are able to, I can see some problems cropping up.
This presidency has been like a stroll through a thesaurus, hasn’t it? How many ways can we say, essentially, “That’s not true…”
A dark and fictional place is a nicely turned phrase. Mendacity, hmm. My English teacher would approve. If you keep saying it with the same way (lie, lying, liar), people start tuning it out. With over 20K lies, prevarications, falsehoods, half-truths, misleading statements, bogus assertions, (etc.) the writers have had their work cut out for them trying to keep it fresh.
And of course there are things that are probably lies. Example, hydroxychloroquine:
“I happen to be taking it,” Trump said during a roundtable event at the White House. “A lot of good things have come out. You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers.”
Was that ever proven, that he took it? If so, how did he get COVID? What are these good things that came out of it. How many front-line workers took it, and what have their outcomes been? Cite? Lots of weasel words, unsubstantiated claims, glittering generalities etc.
It’s been said many times here before, but Trump is a bullshitter. He spews complete and utter bullshit. It’s not “lies” per se, it’s bullshit.
Trump is a shitty, shitty used car salesman. “This is the best car ever!!” Not it’s not. It has bad brakes and the frame is rusted out. The Trump salesman does not care - his job is to spread the bullshit and get the sucker to buy the car. His buyers (voters) are suckers and losers as far as he’s concerned.
As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.
Positivity is the president’s religion. He reacts only to his ideal world - he believes he won the election. He’s asking the states to support his belief. If they do it will become reality in the minds of 70 million voters. Positivity is not lying, it’s creating reality.
I disagree.
You or I would not likely buy a car from him.
But 71 million others would.
I think that he would be used car salesman of the month 10 months out of the year.
I was using “shitty” in the sense of “disgusting excrement that I would not want on the bottom of my shoe” rather than “not good at being an corrupt grifting asshole who scams people”
Fair enough, and to that, I will heartily agree.
Calls to mind the warning* from Baudelaire, that rascal: [quote=Baudelaire, roughly translated] The prettiest trick of the devil is to make us believe he doesn’t exist.[/quote]
*“warning” = “thought-terminating cliche”
ETA: Say what you will about vBB code; it knew how to manufacture a quote box, when a quote box was all that would serve.
It’s actually quite clever (albeit evil). If you tell lies (“The brakes work perfectly”), those claims have some connection to reality, and can hold you to account later when they turn out to be untrue, but mass-scale bullshit is a different thing - it’s like a completely separate, tangled stratum of false information, a free-floating raft of shite; detatched from any connection to ground - and this serves two purposes - it’s makes the bullshit unassailable by facts, and it makes it so that anyone who inhabits that layer never sees the ground and so has no reason to seek it.
I think folks here will get a kick out of the first 2 minutes of this Maricopa county AZ courtroom video:
I could see where this was going almost immediately and it was just as funny when it happened as it was in my head when I realized it was gonna happen.
Has anyone broken down the information Sidney Powell released the other day about dominion and how it was created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez and he used it to win? That whole press release indicated they have tons of evidence that the systems are corrupt. Has it been debunked?
Thoroughly and often.
Any links handy? I’m hoping to see it torn apart, bit by bit, bullet style.