lagtight,

I don‘t think you know what quote mining is.

three obvious illegals

Probably not much of a thread contribution, but we left the US for the UK. Our decision had literally zero to do with ethnicities, sexual orientations or any such stuff.

It was all about work and also about the kids not having to learn a new language before continuing their education.

And for a lot it was the British saying "well it would be wrong to kill all these ******* puritans so let's just send them a few thousand kilometres away instead"

lol kilometres

lol @ America being the best country in the world

Really what is America #1 at? Opiate addicts and guns per capita? Education, health care, welfare, press freedom, human rights are all either already bad or dropping.

Don't be. I haven't lived full-time in America since early 2011 and the odds of going back have declined dramatically over time.

Only the really important stuff like:

- Democracy
- Being Rich
- Number of Poker tables
- Selling corn
- Wasting time on the internet
- Spending money on Scotch (suck on that Scotland!)
- Military spending
- Super Bowl Wins
- Dropping nukes on people
- Bald Eagles
- Making cheese
- Killing people with robots
- Going to work sick

and before the cite or ban trolls start up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.2d45238816b1

lol no

Well, we do have Bill Murray.

Cheese?

And we have a new contender for dumbest post of the year. if you think the US is #1 in democracy, you are completely moronic and out of touch with the world.

We are a completely flawed democracy and we don't crack the top 20 on any list of democracy indexes. We fall behind in nearly every measured metric compared to other democratic free countries in the top 20. GTFO with the USA is #1 narrative. It's not close to being true.

Japan and Korea also probably kill the US on "going to work sick"

Actual list of things America is #1 at sourced from a reputable site:

McDonald's
Wal-Mart
The Gap
Baseball
The NFL
Rock N' Roll
The Internet
Slavery
Starbucks
Disneyworld
Porno
Valium
Reeboks
Fake Tits
Sushi
Taco Bell
Rodeos
Bed, Bath and Beyond
Liberty
White Slips
The Alamo
Band-aids
Las Vegas
Christmas
Immigrants
Popeyes
Democrats
Republicans
Sportsmanship
Books

Team America: World Police became outdated pretty damn fast based on that list.

So wait, some of you think that there's a legitimate chance that the US will become an authoritarian dictatorship, or start rounding up minorities in concentration camps? And yet, the person most derided in this thread is... a guy who made an arguably inaccurate quip about the racial diversity of countries liberals want to move to?

Sorry, this is tinfoil hat territory. It's about as detached from reality as birtherism or Obama-is-a-Muslim-communist conspiracies were for the right. At least before Trump was inaugurated, you could argued that Trump’s rhetoric indicated that he might seriously attempt an authoritarian agenda. But a year later, what’s the evidence? Not just a few cherry-picked examples, but the bigger picture? If you think that Republicans might genuinely rig or even ignore the results of the midterms, then why on Earth couldn’t they rig one crucial Senate election in Alabama of all places? Where are the indicators that Trump might seriously crack down on free press, or put Muslims in internment camps?

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t approve of Trump. But there’s a wide, wide spectrum between “disapprove of” and “think there’s a serious chance of becoming an authoritarian dictator”.

A President trying to discredit government agencies and firing individuals who do not kowtow to him is a pretty serious threat to Democracy. There's a foundation in the belief Trump is authoritarian.

lolnich

Is it treason not to clap for the President? Sure, we can call it that.



“If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?”

“52 percent [of Republicans polled] said that they would support postponing the 2020 election, and 56 percent said they would do so if both Trump and Republicans in Congress were behind this.”

In the past month, Coats, Tillerson, and Pompeo have all proclaimed Russian election interference inevitable.

View this in context of Trump admin refusal to enact sanctions on Russia, illicit meetings with spies, and obstruction of investigation. Their inaction is intentional.

This is a distinct possibility in the future. Now that doesn't mean that Trump will be the one. In fact it's incredibly unlikely that he will. He is too stupid and lazy to pull off something like that.

However, the precedents he and his administration are setting are only going to offer rationalizations for future politicians to push the envelope even further than Trump and his cronies have. Trump is merely loosening the bolts of demcoracy for a future leader to destroy. By the time the damage is something that can be noticed by the average person, it will be too late to undo any of it. At that point, the only option available is a revolution.

grunching

When the New York Times hires literal Nazis to write op-ed pieces.

EV = Sum over possible futures (value of future X probability of future)

Since the value of futures that include things like authoritarian dictatorship, concentration camps, nuclear war, etc are hugely negative, even small increases in their probability will lower EV substantially.

Whoosh

Did you even read the list? Obviously not

If you want to argue that Trump is slowly undermining democratic norms in such a way that the probability of the US falling into authoritarianism in the next few decades is somewhat higher, then I don't really disagree.

However, if you genuinely think that it's a worthwhile use of your time (in an instrumental way, not like a "haha how would you prepare for a zombie apocalypse" kind of way) to have a plan to move before Eternal Leader Trump sends you to a concentration camp, then you really are just as deluded as any other doomsday prepper. Even if your fears were totally justified and Trump managed to turn the US into a clone of Putin's Russia, Putin isn't sending random internet forum posters to the Gulag or preventing them from leaving Russia. To be in genuine danger as a random citizen the US would have to become a totalitarian police state like North Korea, and if that happened, nowhere else in the world would be safe anyway.

Great news guys; no danger of becoming a completely totalitarian state! Stop the protests, everything is fine. Worst case, Russia.

Should have seen that strawman coming. I am not at all saying that you should not protest or criticise Trump. I am saying in that even in the fantastically unlikely event that Trump is able to do to a ~250 year old democracy what Putin was able to do to an always-authoritarian regime, you're still very unlikely to be in any real danger. So the only way this doomsday prepper talk makes any sense is if you think there's a realistic chance that the US turns into North Korea, which is even more ridiculous.

Um, if I lived in Russia I'd be trying like hell to GTFO.