Here's another example of the "raised by wolves" routine and how the simplest reading is probably the most correct.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...aw_speech.html

Man, huehuecoytl, stop assuming such unsavory things about Trump, you're making us look like PizzaGaters.

Also I can see Palin is also going to skate by to some degree on the old "Ron Paul's newsletters were ghostwritten" defense where we argue things done in your name for your business and brand by staffers under your employ don't count unless you sign them in blood and accompany them with an affidavit ("Sarah Palin signs her own tweets with '-SP', so it wasn't her!").

Hey, but I even ham-handedly granted that was kinda interesting, maybe the most interesting thing about this. That the right-wing ecosystem of casual and coded racism is now bizarrely self-sustaining and organic, perhaps by bots and algorithms. See Microsoft's Twitter bot turning virulently racist in under a day once it was let loose on the internet. I have little doubt one plausible explanation is that the combination of bots, lazy staffers, and only one or two wink/noddy racist types having some good old fashioned white supremacist fun could turn a former Vice Presidential candidate's twitter feed into Stormfront really fast. In fact this may be precisely our future where our algorithms simply inherent what we talk about among ourselves, and for you know 40% of the country, actual human generated content contains metric **** tons of racist chain emails and jokes and memes, and so you'll simply get even more bot-generated racism spread quickly and disseminated widely in places you wouldn't expect. Totally believable.

Note however Microsoft took their Tweetbot offline in a day and apologized.

.

Fly makes me smile a lot. I dont think he or others get that when I'm responding to him and the flybies doing their 'extrapolating' - try reading it with amusement on your face and your perception will change dramatically.

I confess to really struggling to understand how people take all the banter so seriously.

Uh, but like, remember how you reacted when people criticized BruceZ?

It's like 3 years later and your meltdown so memorable we're STILL talking about it bro. In fact your mission to defend his honor continues in P7 or whatever it's called.

So what the **** are you talking about, you must understand intuitively. Experience is the greatest teacher.

Yes, you definitely sound legitimately amused and not in the least bit suffering from chronic proctalgia.

Wait, people are actually saying the speech wasn't Turner Diaries For Dummies?

Even the Palin/YoungCons is less obvious.

Occasional serious things happen on the forum. That doesn't mean most of what happens on the forum isn't.

It's not that tricky. Fly is generally very entertaining and most of the forum stuff is intrinsically amusing or ridiculous enough to provide surreal amusement (which is even better)

Well they seem more bothered by me than I am by them but I assume they're not really taking it as seriously as they sound.

There's in between stuff. What's happened to Clovis is bad but that's what people want so it's what you've got.

It's obvious I think, but I want to clarify that I meant that from the perspective of conservatives. Certainly not all Israelis fit the description of its right wing government. There's a very large peace movement there.

I'm going to make one more post and then take some time away from this forum, which frankly saddens me. I'm sure many of you will stop reading at this point, fingers poised to type the inevitable "good riddance", "cya", "glad we got rid of another right-wing stooge" posts. This will also be a tldr post so please feel free to ignore.

I have been playing poker for 15 years and learned much of what I know about the game on this site. I'm not famous as a poker player, just a marginally profitable local cash grinder. I have however been deeply immersed in the poker community which has convinced me that poker players are, on average, more intelligent than the average population. This led me to the politics section of this site, in hopes of learning from intelligent people who are rational and employ logic and reason. I have learned a lot from the politics forum on this site.

I have unfortunately noticed a significant change in this sub-forum over the past year. More an more it is simply a echo chamber where everyone tries to out scream each other and claim the label of most extreme poster. Myself included.

I have no doubt many of the disagreements I have gotten into on this site have been largely my fault because I was either flat out wrong or doing a poor job explaining my position. I have learned a lot from these debates as I find disagreement enlightening. I have no problem with being challenged when I am wrong. I thrive on it. I run a small company and have 50 employees. My staff know they are expected to challenge me and the absolutely best ones want my job. This is how the best ideas get to the top.

This being said, the last couple days I have been widely attacked on this site and defended by only one poster. I honesty cannot figure out what my crime was other than;

1) not being extreme enough; and
2) Wanting us to stand by our principals and allow for nuanced discussion.

It was not enough that I called Palin a racist, awful human and one of the worst politicians currently active. I wouldn't call her a white supremacist so this instantly made me the enemy and even a likely GOP stooge.

Even this morning people are still posting that there is no value in differentiating a racist from a white supremacist and that ALL republicans are the latter.

How is this healthy debate?

It appears the widely held opinion here is that all republicans, everyone who has ever voted republican, or even held a “republican” idea is an extreme radical and white supremacist. I'm also a likely GOP racist because I'm not extreme enough to follow the above.

Do we really think this is a position from which our side is going to win.

I’ve seen many right wing posters enter this thread and us pounce on them instantly. I HAVE JOINED IN THE LYNCHING! Look around there are no other voices here. None. Some of these were obvious trolls but are we all sure ALL of them were?

You have now successfully silenced me as well. Someone who has spent their life working with left-wing politics. Someone who has joined in the screaming and even been banned a couple times for not following my own advice. I too am now not extreme enough. I am sure some of the right wing lurkers are laughing their ass off right now and I don't blame them. I would be too if the situation were reversed.

I hate to say it because I love this forum but it is moving slowly in the direction of 4chan and /theDonald where the only point is to reinforce our hatred of the other side even if that means posting obvious nonsense. Soon we will have our own pizza-gate and nobody will notice how it happened.

I am active on a reddit forum called “Change my View” where the quality of discourse is more important than the content. I am going to look for something similar for politics because I think this forum has hurt my ability to be rational as it fed my hatred. It has made me worse as discussing these important issues, not better.

Anyway, I may still lurk and I wish you all the best but it saddens me that it really feels like our side is adopting the tenor and tactics of the alt-right more and more and it doesn't seem to be alarming enough people.

For those people on this site like Dvaut, ChrisV and Microbet who are great posters, I apologize for painting with too broad a brush. Like all communities, there are the good and the bad. It just feels like the bad is winning out right now.

All the factory and farm workers at the tobacco companies knew too. They sure know now. So does anyone who works at 7/11 and sells a pack.

I made this point at some point in the past few days but there IS a bit of a "racist asshat" spectrum. On the one hand are most deplorable American types who haven't thought that deeply about it, and want to see racial and religious minorities brought to heel and see them suffer as second-class citizens. Then there's the faux intellectual ethno-nationalist ******* who believes basically things like "white Christians control things here in the US and Europe, Jews go over there in Israel, Asians in the East, Africans to Africa." As you note, tons of deplorables LOVE the notion of Israel. Some are religious types who simply want Israel to exist and then be blown away to fulfill a prophecy. Others want Israel to exist because they see a state that abuses Palestinians is a valuable example; and because they think "Western Values" defenders have some sort of 'legitimate' place to demand Jews self-deport to.

Clovis,

Thanks for the shoutout. Fly is really the only one who yelled at you. He's yelled at me too. But, a break from this forum is probably a good idea for every single one of us. Not that I'm taking one now.

This is a thread about Trump so I'm not going to keep going into it but there were plenty of threads about the Tea Party if you search.

This convo reminds me of a Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi about Palin Tea Party rallies.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...party-20100928

His theory is that they are either racist or too dumb and self absorbed to be aware of the racism of their actions.

Damn, I edited that post responding to ChrisV when I meant to quote myself, it's too late to change it and now it's kind of orphaned.

Federal elections are ran by the individual States.

So to stop "fair elections" (whatever that means) it more than just passing one bill at the federal level.

I hesitate to wade into this war between Clovis and Fly, and I've been mostly off line for a few days, but here is my two cents.

I think there is some nuance here, but it is not a nuance that I care about when deciding whether Sarah Palin is a blight on humanity.

People like Sarah Palin willingly spend time in the media cesspool of the alt-right. They read and laugh at the memes, slogans, and clickbait articles. They meet, greet and want support from the sorts of idiots that are responsible for those memes, slogans and articles, most of whom are racists and a smaller subset of whom are actually affiliated with white supremacist organizations.

Over time, the language of the alt-right meme armies more and more becomes the language of people like Palin. Sometimes, she uses coded phrases like "14 words" without a clear sense of how the phrase crept into her lexicon or the origin of the phrase. Maybe it was something she picked up from an alt-right clickbait that "destroyed" the libtards. She doesn't really care if the origin of the term is racist or whatever, because caring about such things is for oversensitive libtards. (As an aside, the white supremacist meaning of the phrase is somewhat obscure among the general public. I just asked my wife whether she had ever heard that phrase, and she said no.)

Other times, she knowingly uses phrases that she knows have a double meaning (like "14 words") to provoke those same libtards and win the affection of the alt-right meme armies.

I don't know which category this particular use of "14 words" falls into. And I don't care. One of the reasons I don't care is because Sarah Palin herself doesn't care if phrases like 14 words have origins in white supremacy. And if she doesn't care about something like that, then she can float away on the same iceberg with the white supremacists as far as I'm concerned. The distinction between a white supremacist, and someone who doesn't care if she is adopting the language of white supremacists, is too subtle to be of much concern.

I can't figure out why you guys find Fly so entertaining or fear him so much. He just yells a lot and make bad iterations of DVaut's posts, with frequent logical mistakes added on top.

This is a predominantly "left-wing" sub forum (or at least the American version of leftist). I don't get what so important about Fly that make you guys think he's somewhat tolerable.

Sort of like a guy who calls every river is a "very good" bluff catcher.

Dunking on trolls and mouth breathers seems to be the great pastime of this subforum. I enjoy it sometimes, but there are some persistent asshats that I wish everyone would just ignore.

Truth.

You made this post because you're a big baby who can't handle an L.

Yelling may not have been the best term, but it wasn't just Fly.

Since we're on another round of "let's litigate Fly" and I've been referenced a few times as "one of the good ones" or whatever, I feel fit to comment here.

I'll just this as a jumping off point:

True story I believe deeply: part of Fly's deep offenses to white guys on the internet is entirely cultural. ~Most white guys or at least a certain class of them are perfectly happy to offend others in ways that they can bet they won't be subjected to. Or laugh along with it, or embrace it as schtick. Cruelness and derision is everywhere. Just look around. Much of it done justifiably or under the guise of humor, of entertainment. Lots of civil discourse is frankly boring.

But very rarely are white guys the subject of the cruelty or the butt of the joke. That is, part of white guy privilege in America is the unspoken conceit that we treat each other (white guys) with respect. With civility. That is rarely afforded to women and racial minorities. Or the poor. Or other losers. They can be the subject of jokes, derision, be subject to pedantic explanations, a complete lack of empathy.

You can sense tons of white guy offense isn't that Fly's abrasive style is OBJECTIVELY offensive. If it was, plenty of you would be absolutely aghast, simply despondent at the state of the world. It's only CONTEXTUALLY offensive. The great offense of white guys on the internet is that they never expect to be treated like that. Because the world is full of Fly's. I am quite convinced in the right context, many of you embrace the Fly persona. I'm quite sure I do. It's common. Life is boring, and we get entertainment by mocking and being trangressive with those different from us. It's common!

That is to say, you should be a little shocked that people react to Fly with what is entirely common human behavior. Like they are special, precious flowers given the enormous amounts of anger, cruelty, and apathy in the world. The amount of people who are entertained by heaping all of that on others. But once you come to terms with the fact tons of white guys ARE treaed exactly like special, precious flowers for all of their lives by their Moms, maybe their Dads, by their love interests (if they have them), by their teachers, society at large, etc. then I suppose some of the surprise goes away.

So if I'm supposed to be "the good one" and the voice of reason here, then people who get super bothered by Fly should read what I say above and take it very seriously because I mean it and believe it deeply.

Either that, or he's a bad poster who makes bad arguments and swears a lot. You know, one of those two theories.