Forum Replies Created
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Personally, I reject that kind of vote-shaming entirely. It’s lame. It’s false. It’s tiresome. It’s also reminiscent of the illogical framing of the 2000 election as “Nader handed the election to Bush,” which did not happen. Since our presidents win via the electoral college, and it’s cumulative, no one state can be decisive. They all count. And people don’t get to narrow down their counterfactuals like that. If you say, “Well, if only they had voted for Gore in Florida,” you also have to go back and look at all the other variables there, and in every other state.
For instance, Gore lost his own state of Tennessee. If he had won it, even with the loss in Florida, he gains the presidency.
Another counterfactual? 308,000 Dems voted for Bush in Florida. How does it make sense to blame the 24,000 Nader voters who were potential Gore voters, when 308,000 Dems voted for Bush?
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Beyond all of that: One could just as easily say that any vote for Clinton is a vote for Trump. No one owes their vote to the Dems. Clinton isn’t entitled to them. And because she has so much baggage, she may well lose to Trump.
Stein wouldn’t, if every person who votes for Clinton voted for her instead. She’d defeat Trump. Why? Because she’d get both the Dem vote and independent lefties. Clinton will only get the Dem vote.
Best way to convince voters to vote for your candidate? Show she’s actually the best possible choice. Vote-shaming just turns people off and likely pushes them to stay home.
Climate Change exists four times each year where I live. Inequality exists too as Hildabeast getting a pass on her email crimes proves.
bnw, do you think man-made climate change is happening? And do you think we have a serious problem of economic inequality? Politics aside. Politicians aside. Do you think these things exist as serious issues in their own right?
Of course climate change is happening four times each year where I live. But ‘climate change’ is used by those to obscure the fraud of ‘global warming’ that despite all the money and data manipulation and data destruction and endless propaganda hurled upon humankind the earth is cooling not warming.
Yes the economic inequality here is so bad that people from around the world still try to make their way here any way they can legally and illegally. If I knew how to post pictures I could show some exceptional Cuban efforts.
I’ll save climate science stuff for another post, while hoping others weigh in as well.
So, just on the inequality part:
Just twenty Americans now hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the nation combined. Again, that’s 20 people having as much wealth as roughly 160 million Americans combined. The 18th century denizens of Versailles never had it so good.
The richest 1% now hold as much wealth as the bottom 99% of the country combined. The richest 0.1% holds as much as the bottom 90%.
The richest 1% now bring in roughly 23% of all income — though I’ve seen this figure as high as 25%. That’s nearly a quarter of all income for just 1% of the nation, leaving the bottom 99% to fight over roughly 75% of the rest.
In the 1950s, your average CEO made roughly twenty times as much as his rank and file workers. In the 1960s, it was roughly 25 to 1.
Today? Roughly 300 to 1. In Fortune 100 companies, it’s roughly 1000 to 1.
Leaving aside the fact of people wanting to come here from war-torn, ravaged, impoverished nations, do the above stats bother you? Do you see them as indications of something unfair, perhaps even obscenely wrong? Or, at least, as bad for the economy overall?
I know you are trying BT. I see that. That post of mine was as much a reminder to myself as anything else.
I just hate rancorous, endless, get-nowhere, no-point-in-it, Bickering.
Lets say bnw goes “yawn” — well, why react at all? Why…react…at…all?
We react because of emotions. Thats all. Emotions. Yes? No?w
vWell, I thought I responded with humor after the “yawn,” suggesting that he get more sleep and maybe try Melatonin. And then after the third or fourth “yawn,” I upped the ante to Ambien.
I thought you liked humor.
Okay, okay. No reaction is better.
It also shows how important Greek myths were to the theology of early Christianity. The Greek gods, especially Zeus, were always impregnating mortal girls, thus producing demi-gods — like Heracles, Perseus and Achilles.
The dead and resurrected messiah also draws on Greek and earlier myths going back to at least the Egyptians. Deities being torn apart and brought back to life again, like Osiris and Dionysus. This appears to be a reflection of actual human sacrificial practices of ritual slaughtering of kings — to protect a tribe, a kingdom or produce a better harvest, etc. etc. Eventually, they got wise, and no longer allowed themselves to actually be killed, but were instead, symbolically sacrificed and then reborn from under the skirts of priestesses, usually.
We find echoes of this in myths and thousands of years later, like the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King, the Holy Grail, the Waste land and so forth. The king being tied directly to the earth. His failing health or loss of limb meaning meaning the tribe or kingdom was in grave danger of collapse. In that story, the king’s being pierced by a spear is a euphemism for castration . . . which was perhaps the ultimate in connections between king and country.
From Ritual to Romance, by Jessie L Weston, was one of the great early books studying this. T.S. Eliot drew heavily from it for his great poem, the Wasteland.
It’s interesting that the number of scientists that identify as atheists varies depending on their discipline. The highest number of believers are in the social sciences whereas the fewest are in biology and physics. This makes sense to me because they are the two sciences that’s findings are constantly contradicting religious dogma.
Sure seems like the biological sciences are knocking at the door of parthenogenesis which will affirm the Immaculate Conception.
Parthenogenesis happens all the time. It occurs in all sorts of invertebrates and even some vertebrates like varanid lizards. But unless Jesus was a rotifer or Komodo dragon then parthenogenesis wouldn’t explain the virgin birth. Besides, organisms that employ the XX, XY chromosome system (as humans do) and undergo parthenogenesis can only produce a clone of the mother because no Y chromosome is present. That means Jesus had to be a woman.
“The Virgin Birth” is a translation error. We know it’s impossible from a biological point of view — at least for humans. It was a mistranslation of Hebrew scripture (Isaiah), which used “almah” (young woman) not “bethulah” (virgin). The Septuagint mistranslates “young woman” into the Greek “parthenos” (virgin).
In order to claim divine parentage for Jesus, the gospel of Matthew posits the fulfillment of a prophecy which was never about a “virgin birth” in the first place. As in, the entire thing is built on an error of translation.
But Americans dont want to “waste their votes” so
they will vote for a monster.No-one is twisting their voting-arms.
I will vote for Hillary because Trump is significantly worse and by a wide margin.
I will then join the “third party alternative” and/or “reform the dems” thing the day after the election.
That’s just me listing my vote. Not arguing. If I can’t talk anyone else into it, so be it.
If I catch flak for it here, so be that too.
Hildabeast is a crook so Trump is much better. I will vote for Trump.
If being a “crook” is a deal-breaker for you, bnw, then you shouldn’t be voting for Trump. He made tens of millions ripping off students at Trump University, tens of millions ripping off business partners in his many bankruptcies, tens of millions from taxpayers playing the debt game. He’s currently fighting thousands of lawsuits for his crooked business practices. And if elected, he’ll pocket additional tens of millions, personally, from slashing the top tax rate and ending the estate tax. The latter, btw, impacts just 0.2% of the country. The richest 0.2%. More than 99.8% of the country won’t see any “tax relief” from the end of the estate tax, but government programs will take a hit so the rich can get richer.
Oh, and Mr “fair trade” outsources labor for his manufacturing companies. And, he’s a serial liar.
I understand not wanting to vote for Clinton. I won’t either. But voting for Trump makes zero sense, given your criteria.
