"Hey Chris? Its Chuckie.

Yeah, hey listen. We're gonna need you as a character witness *mumbles*orpossiblyasafallguywhowearegonnasayisara pist* huh? what? no, nothing. Its fine. Can you sign this letter?"

In 24 hours I went from "They're just gonna grit their teeth and jam this through" to "He's done, there won't even be a hearing." We live in interesting times.

Slimed guy needs to appear with Ford.

Maddow said Republicans have already hired a law firm to conduct their questioning if she appears. They are afraid of looking like pigs on camera again.

https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-09-...ill-maker.html

I think I will take 100,000 to one for ten bucks.

I wouldn't want anyone who'd accept that job to represent me.

chyme, you must understand. they really DON'T want you and i in here, their cozy fishbowl. their arguments work best when there is no one to disagree with them.
and truant, just so you can direct your insults to the right person, it was i who suggested that a reading of the constitution might benefit you, but chyme might have mentioned it too. yes, your comments make it that obvious.
have a wonderful night, all.
chyme, save your energy. you and i will be dealing with these unbiased non-partisans for another 6 years, at least.

you have made a mistake in one of your assumptions here. can you guess which one?

They don't care. Western media makes this mistake with Putin all the time "it makes him look bad" yeah he sure really gives a ****. It will not impact votes from at least 85% of the country. The other guys in this thread shouldn't be dismissed so quickly as I alluded to before--lots of people that aren't trump supporters will view this like they are.

They're also not defending many seats in the senate races. Worst case for them is Ted Cruz isn't in the senate anymore? Nobody likes him.

Also it's the Trump cycle, seemingly a million new things will have popped up between now and november. Less than a quarter of voters will even be able to tell you who kavanaugh is then. People forget. (gorsuch is a very low number himself atm). I'm keeping up and I'm still forgetting a lot.

Eh I'm still gonna white knight for her a little here, but only in a specific way. I think she's a complex character who has perhaps descended into a bit of right wing hack territory, but even then, the real point is that her politics are bad.

So, again: I encourage people to read World on Fire. As I said, she's carrying tons of water for leftist arguments there, essentially lambasting a lot of bad Heritage Foundation style right-wingerism that informed lots of destructive early aughts American foreign policy, and probably still does today. And surely back into time, dating back to the Cold War. She's essentially saying the idea that you functionally just up-end regimes, even bad ones, drop in a mix of bombs/capitalism/free markets and leave -- that's a recipe for chaos, for exploitation. It will brew up a right-wing backlash that inevitably crushes the global poor and the already-exploited. Any leftist who has criticized American imperialism, cultural imperialism, free market orthodoxy -- you're functionally making a lot of the same arguments Chua did then.

As I said, the book isn't perfect; she's ultimately trying to salvage markets and she's probably approaching race science type arguments (effectively that dominant local ethnic majorities were dominant for a reason, and that disruptive foreign intervention ran the risk of empowering market dominant minorities who will upset the majority ethnic groups, or simply empower the corrupt and the grifty, and that in those conditions, democracy will fail and produce a right-wing backlash). For better or worse, though, that sort of race science **** IS a bit endemic to conservativism writ large. It's why I said she's really harkening back to an older style of right-wingerism that was more common in the early 20th century, that looked a bit warily at capitalism precisely because it threatened old and traditional social order. She is almost a direct descendant of ideology which is both bad but also discrete and different from the modern day fascist right, imo.

But, if anyone doesn't want to read her books and wants a faster way to judge, you can listen to her on Chris Hayes podcast:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...ipt-ncna882186

I really don't think she's a moron. I do think her politics are largely wretched. In fact, my whole point of entering into this Amy Chua Judgement Day thing is to make sure we on the left don't embrace her. Consider that grizy and someone else above are like "she's really a leftist." Don't let her stain us; I just don't want to flat out call her a moron, she's not. I think she's just pedestrian bad.

HAVING said that:

1. I didn't read The Triple Package, so if she's devolving into race science screeds and/or right-wing hacky stuff, I totally buy it. Trolly posted an article earlier where she has a sympathetic friend in Charles Murray who almost surely fits the same category or at least fills a neighboring typology. I don't want to get into a credentialism debate but Murray went to Harvard and has a phd from MIT; it's pretty unlikely he's a moron. He's just a racist and evil. We can separate the two.

2. I'm not defending Chua the child abuser, or Chua the groomer of Kavanaugh boners.

Can't she be smart but simply have ****ty politics? Those people exist too!

Now, the rant, and why I think we're talking about this:

A lot of this really seems like it's borne out of a bad leftist mentality that all bad people are de facto morons. I think this is degraded, and functionally a long standing gripe of mine.

I wrote a long thing 10 years ago about Chris Langan who is almost surely the smartest human that has ever been measured AND a complete monster, but for whatever reason this sends people into fits trying to claim Langan is either truly dumb, or he cheats on tests, or IQ tests are totally useless.

WHY? I think because the left is still wrapped up in technocratic political schemes and wedded to the notion that leftism is meaningful and good because it's What Smart People Think or it's more empirical than right-wingerism. Well, both might be true, but I honestly couldn't give a **** and neither should the left. I'm a leftist because I think social equality is an unqualified good and guiding moral principle. I get the sense many on the left are so motivated to discredit Chua types as idiots because they themselves lack commitment to genuine leftist principles and so they're working sideways into discrediting the entire right-wing as some sort of anti-intellectual exercise. Letting Chua remain as smart but poorly principled, amoral and ghoulish (all the evidence lines up in that direction) is unsatisfying and produces cognitive dissonance on the left.

I get that in the 2018 that decrying any right-winger or right-wing adjacent fellow traveler as a moron is increasingly true since it's self-selecting for morons and will hit more often than it misses; it is an entirely compelling argument since the right IS now deeply anti-intellectual and anti-empirical. But that's like, only one tangential reason to be skeptical of right-wingerism. The better criticism is that it embraces competitive social hierarchies that incentivizes wretched anti-social behaviors (like Chua demonstrates!) and is inimical to human flourishing.

I mean, to summarize all the points here and bring it full circle, the truly unfortunate thing about the right and their ideas is that it takes someone like Chua who I truly believe is smart and is surely talented and ambitious and turns their efforts and capacities into grooming young women to be leered at by pervy rich old powerful guys like Kavanaugh. Her intellectual capacities are truly wasted trying to game and manipulate these hierarchies or provide a moral justification for them, instead of tearing them down.

FWIW frantic, everyone in this thread also(let me be honest, it was actually the 2016 election thread, but prolly same political spectrum representation as here) said there was NO F***ing WAY trump would win presidency, and berated and attacked anyone who suggested otherwise. yea, nothing but level headed open minds here. and, so so smart.

The problem, genuinely, is that you don't know anything. Do you realize it's possible to watch 3 hours of Fox or listen to 3 hours of Rush and know less than when you started? It's because they do not practice journalism. They simply represent the voice of people dumb enough to buy gold or supplements or whatever their advertisers are selling.

There's a reason many well-informed people from very different backgrounds can agree on a lot of things with regard to Trump and Kavanaugh. It's because there exists something called reality, which some subset of the population is interested in understanding.

The weirdest thing on here and it happened *all the time* in unchained was when two right wing people start talking in the same thread one keeps thinking they're friends with the other and the other just doesnt acknowledge them. Is this just a case of being old and deplorable online because I don't understand it

My mistake. You are the one who said he’d keep his signature to lolbother me but didn’t even in that post, and here said goodnight to everyone and then didn’t leave. Got ya now.

Uh, you know those threads didnt disappear, right?
Alex made his money betting at 3:1 iirc.

Almost every Asian-American I've known is conservative-leaning. I'm guessing it has something to do with being self-reliant in a new country and happy to be out from under some of the shackles of their home culture - whether Chinese political repression, or other cultural mores and suppression. I dunno.

To their credit - almost every Asian-American I know also sees right though the modern Republican party as a dangerous, morally bankrupt scam.

bruh

Goddam you for quoting DS and luring me into clicking that.

To the extent you are correct, that just means that a lot of people overestimated their fellow citizens. Fact is, most people know very little about politics, history, law, and most other things. Still, Trump is a particular edge case, because not only is it completely clear that he's a moron, but it's also clear as day that he's a narcissistic used car salesman who lies as often as he breathes and will say anything he thinks will help him at any given instant.

To the extent seeing through Trump requires some limited amount of knowledge, people like me considered it possible he could potentially do fine in politics, but I, for one, assumed even the uninformed could at least recognize a con man who is no good at being a con man. Guess not. You could perhaps say I was too open minded.

You're giving him and this *way* too much thought and credit. Trump was always drawing dead for the popular vote. It's very tough to lose the popular vote by a significant margin yet claim an electoral victory. This only opened up after the Comey letter.

I made zero assumptions. Learn to read better, please

Guys don't you know, because people/experts got the trump election "wrong". (Ignore probabilities here for a sec) people/experts now no longer have any credibility on any issue.

All of the Trumpkins repeat the true odds as being a "mortal lock, lol libs". I get annoyed in real life but on a poker forum? Maybe Mason is on to something here. Nah.

Same thing with Hispanics. If the Republicans would just moderate their rhetoric, the Dems would be in trouble in the short term.

Long term, its as inevitable as a sunrise........ millennials are already the largest group of people in society. When they decide to get off their ass and vote, its going for the Dems. Women have already tired of old white men demeaning, devaluing and in general not being treated as the equals they are.

The chickens are going to come home to roost sooner than later.

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