Epstein’s Law: every accusation from a Conservative [of being guilty of a thing] is a confession [of being guilty of the thing]
They do it cause it works. When you’ve got a couple billion in media capital that you can fling around, it is very easy to just say “You’re the pedo! You’re the crook! You’re the dictator! You’re doing genocide!” on the loudest volume.
And it doesn’t help when your opposition takes it at face value and announces “We’re looking into whether we’re all degenerate freaks. We’re taking these allegations very seriously” in between sucking up to the same batch of billionaire sociopaths bankrolling the fascist movement.
I think you meant to say “exactly what they did with Biden”.
As much as the GOP is a fascist authoritarianism loving piece of shit, this is true and this needs to be called out.
They exactly did this
Oh look…another gotcha. Oh look…zero effect
if the GOP cared about consistency, or had any shame to begin with… we wouldn’t even be having these problems.
It’s only the Dems who seem to care about doing things by the book, taking the high road, being proper… and we can all see where that’s getting us.
Democrats are the Eddard Stark to Republicans Cersei Lannister
This is an amazing comparison because Eddard Stark was still the asshole who beheaded a kid for running away from the nights’ watch.
Eddard Stark was still the asshole who beheaded a kid for running away from the nights’ watch.
Propaganda in action.
Dude was a deserter, formerly a rapist. Read the books, not fake news.
Dude was a deserter, formerly a rapist.
Not to question the system of press ganging convicts into military service or the maybe somewhat dubious accuracy of medieval courts, but you’re still saying a kid deserves to be decapitated for these two things.
In a fictional fantasy realm with dragons and magic, sure. It’s not like Ned was happy about it.
I think the wide appeal of GoT was how little actual sorcery was included, especially in the early books. The stories were fairly gritty and characters were relatable.
Probably the best part of the first book was Ned Stark discovering Punnett squares while investigating all of King Rob’s bastards.
I read all the books. It’s been a while.
In that case he’s not at all like a democrat if his major flaw was thinking everyone else was as honorable as him.
Wow, really hypocritical of me to be so blasie about executions in the first episode. I guess I’ve learned a lot.
As an outsider, democrats seems to be, not very democratic. Sure vote democrat next election because the rest is so much worse (the system itself is badly designed IMO, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot voting anything else than the two big parties) but don’t judge them on the baseline of what the republicans are.
To paraphrase Goebbels. “Accuse your opponents of what you are doing.”
I don’t even think they realize they’re doing it half of the time. It’s wild.
They don’t. To paraphrase Innuendo studios. ‘They do what what they believe works without understanding why it works’.
They follow the nazi playbook so well I have a hard time believing it’s not bedtime reading for republicans.
It’s for Trump. He had a book of speeches by Hitler on his bedside table. Doubt he can actually read above the level of children’s literature though.
Republicans: “Joe Biden is literally dead and has been replaced by a clone”
Billionaire-Owned Mass Media: “Is Joe Biden a zombie clone? We spend six weeks asking the question over and over again in man-on-the-street interviews”
Democrats: “I can’t wait till a Republican is President so they get the same treatment”
Billionaire-Owned Mass Media: “Trump says he’s the healthiest any man has ever been. We spend six weeks asking the question over and over again in man-on-the-street interviews”
Democrats: “This is unfair”
Also Democrats: “Please, Billionaires. We love you so much. Donate us more of your money”
Accuse is really sugar coating it for Dems. Both parties have covered up severe health problems of the presidents, that’s what tends to happens when you have 70+ yr old Presidents.
At the same time it makes you realize how a well-chosen cabinet can run the show. Which makes you wonder, why have a president at all, some countries use a council now instead. Less “rockstar” and consolidated power. Make politicians bureaucratic again.
Make politicians bureaucratic again.
Sorry if rubbing this in, but as an outsider looking at US politics, the opposite was quite literally what people asked for since “pOliTiCs iS bOrInG” and they only started to engage in politics simply because Trump came to power to laugh at him. Now, it turned that he is a full blown fascist, and people are starting to have buyer’s remorse, and wish they didn’t wish to turn politics into circus and demand it to become boring again.
People don’t put that much thought into who they elect unfortunately.
I am of the mind that the USA’s branches should be broken up into four major regions, each with a regional court, house, and president. These presidents can pick a figurehead president to represent the nation, but that one has had to previously served as a regional president, and can be removed by the regional presidents or by popular vote. Also, term and age limits, to ensure that the decisions of the officials more closely reflect the interests of the general population.
Each of the four regions can send representative judges and congressmen to a national court & senate, which only creates laws and refines them with a majority vote between the four regions. Otherwise, each of the four regions upholds their own laws in their respective territories. Judge-wise, I figure each region can send 4 to the national court, each president 1 apiece that only lasts during a president’s tenure, and the figurehead president a supreme justice who can only do tiebreaking votes and writes up rulings made by the court. That is essentially 16 judges that aren’t picked by presidents, with only 5 more being presidential picks that leave office when their boss leaves office. 21 in total.
I think this sort of arrangement would make it much harder for officials to be captured by interests, since each region is basically a nation unto itself. This essentially breaks up the federal government, making it harder to bully individual states.
Term limits make it vastly easier for politicians to be captured by special interests. Politicians lose “doing a good job” as a way to have a continued job going forward, making them more susceptible to looking at how their vote will impact their future employment. It also means that even well intentioned representatives don’t have time to properly learn how the system works and become effective before they need to leave, making power shift to unelected groups. At best their political party providing knowledgeable staff and legislation to propose, and as is often the case various special interest groups who can work to finance campaigns as well as provide pre-packaged legislation, media campaigns to encourage voters to encourage you to pass it, and assurances of various roles that can provide post political life influence and money.
The way you reduce the influence of interests is to make it so their levers don’t work anymore. If politicians get a pension even after being voted out of office a cushy board position is less appealing. If they get paid generously in office there’s less incentive to court outside influence, or risk your money by accepting it. If you can keep that going as long as voters like you, you only have incentive to keep voters happy.
Finally, why would you want to say to voters “sorry, this politician consistently provides what you’re looking for in a representative so you can’t have them anymore. You need to pick someone new who doesn’t have any legislative record or experience”?
In part, capturing of interests comes from a politician becoming old. Bernie is an exception, but most aging politicians get used to their ‘nest’ and being set in their ways. This is bad, as it prevents new young blood being consistently introduced into the system to represent the younger half of the population. What we lose in experience, we replace with the conviction and audacity of youth.
Ideally, the older departed politicians would spend time on mentoring people during their retirement if politics is what motivates them.
As to the concept of pay that you outlined, I don’t disagree. I think that part of a overhaul for a reworked America is UBI, alongside income, wealth, and asset caps. Part of it is that leadership in organizations should have their pay grade set by workers within the organization - the CEO needs the rank and file workers to decide whether they keep the CEO, and if so, where to set the pay bracket. In turn, this could also apply to politicians. Initially they start at a waitress’s* pay in office, and then voters can vote on the politician’s income every year or so. The trading of favors would remain an issue, though the implementation that I have in mind would make it easier to track corruption. It is harder to own more than one yacht, when that costs more than the asset cap that affords a good house and car.
*If a politician can’t live on a waiter’s income, then that income ain’t fit for a human. Having the initial income of a politician reflect society at large would help make them reflect on the economy and its effect on people.
So, ignoring the straight up agism (aging makes people set in their ways. People can only represent people the same age as them, regardless of what those people want. Young people just have more conviction and “audacity”), do you have any evidence for anything you’ve asserted there, or is it all just based on feels?
https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/term-limits
https://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/michigan-wonk-blog/term-limits-what-do-they-do
There’s evidence that you’re wrong about term limits.
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/analysis-pay-legislators-more-for-better-representation/
Same goes for legislative compensation.
You feel like you’re pushing to make politicians bring in fresh ideas and drive income higher. In reality those policies select for people who don’t need money from a second job and gives them no incentive to represent their constituency once elected.
As for the age thing, you’re essentially saying to boot Sanders for JD Vance. He is basically half his age, so he must be more representative of younger people’s beliefs, right?
I’d rather let voters decide who represents them than tell them who they’re allowed to like.The vast majority of the Democratic’s higher leadership are elderly. I like Bernie, but it is clear that Republicans, despite being shit, actually have representation of their younger cohort and benefit from that vitality. Just look at the Democrats: inaction and timidity is the default state among their politicians. An old person cannot fully grasp the issues of the day and have less energy to carry out an agenda, whatever that may be. Biden wasn’t willing to use the immunity that the Supreme Court handed him, despite fully knowing that Trump won’t hesitate to abuse it.
Also, term limits would help prevent the likes of Nancy Pelosi from freezing out potentially great leaders from ascending into higher ranks of leadership - which reinforces the priorities of establishment, rather than voters. We have many mayors and governors among the Republicans who don’t have town halls, or simply ignore their constitutes. Sometimes, an incumbent simply stays in office due to no viable competition appearing, no matter the (de)merits of the sitting official.
As to evidence, just lots of history books. It typically isn’t the older rulers who change the fate of nations in a helpful way. Their idleness, is typically the cause of famine, decay, and disaster, because they simply didn’t care or couldn’t understand.
Also, I have an elderly parent, and it ain’t no picnic. It is hard to ‘adult’, when the home owner doesn’t want the world around them to change. Opportunities or risk mitigation, neither can happen if the old cannot grasp the implications of inaction - which they are prone to do. It isn’t hard to map such biological reality onto politics, because politicians are fleshy humans, with all the issues that comes with aging.
I will grow old, and so shall you - we both will become infirm and dimwitted, and so will politicians we have elected. That is why it is important for the young to elect the young.
So you don’t actually have any empirical evidence for term limits doing what you say they will, and your dead set on judging people by their age and not their actual capabilities.
You’re reducing a person to a number and ignoring their actual personhood. If you think that someone is mentally unfit for office, argue based on them, not their age.
Maybe it will make more sense if we replace one characteristic of a person that isn’t relevant to the job with another:The vast majority of the Democratic’s higher leadership are Jewish. I like Bernie, but it is clear that Republicans, despite being shit, actually have representation of their Christian cohort and benefit from that vitality.
Religion has as much to do with the job as age.
It typically isn’t the older rulers who change the fate of nations in a helpful way. Their idleness, is typically the cause of famine, decay, and disaster, because they simply didn’t care or couldn’t understand.
Citation needed. Hitler took power at 43. Stalin at 46. Mao at 56. Pol pot at 50. Czar Nicholas II was 50 when he died and took office at 27. Lincoln was 56. Ghandi was most influential in his 70s. FDR was in his 50s. Pretty good spread for leaders I could think of off the top of my head who were notably good or bad. Who were you thinking? “Look at history books” isn’t evidence when history books are full of people of all ages doing basically everything.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(24)00140-5/fulltext
the majority of individuals aged 65 years and older are cognitively unimpaired. Age does not equate to cognitive decline and is not a good marker for an individual’s ability to serve in a political role. Although poor performance in younger people might be perceived as a one off, for example due to ill preparation or a poor night’s sleep, in older adults the assumption is all too often that it is due to cognitive decline.
Have you considered that that’s just how your parent is, and their age has nothing to do with it?
I had aging parents too. One was basically fine until the end, other than arthritis and blood pressure. The other has a host of ailments, and the only mental change was that he got more progressive, since he had more time to read, and he refused to accept that his sense of taste was getting weaker.You do understand that people are voting for these politicians you want to bar from office, right? Not liking who people choose to represent them is usually best acted upon by voting for someone else, or encouraging someone you like more to run, not by disqualifying the person most people preferred.
You should take a step back and consider why you hold your beliefs. Are they based on feelings about how you think the world is, or should be, or are they based in things that are objectively true? How do you know they’re true?
Herp a derp, both sides, derp
More of an anti elect 65+ yr old senior citizens than anything else
It’s more like, both sides, but one is even worse.
There is no left wing party in the US (that’s been in power).
Politics is not a football team
Even your first president knew it would turn out this way and opposed a two party system because of it
You mean the first military commander installed as the President who was known as one of the most corrupt people ever?
Yes, even the most corrupt person ever knew it was a bad idea!
Help me out on this one; search fails to find anything particularly damning, beyond the crimes perpetuated by the US against gestures broadly, which didn’t seem to benefit Washington much in particular. Anything he did that was well worse than his peers?
I can find plenty looking up even on Google so I am not sure if you really tried. Your last bit is pretty disingenuous, worse than his peers?
So already we can’t judge him for being a slave holder (even though at the time slavery was already known as wrong) and doing things like extracting teeth out of slave’s mouths to implant in his.
Other founding fathers are known to have engaged in acts of terrorism. Murder, rape, arson, and bombings were used against their fellow colonists. There was a masterful propaganda campaign where numerous lies were told to deceive colonists.
George Washington went on to lead these people and be a figurehead for the revolutionary war. Being a military commander he was of course responsible for numerous deaths. I find fault in this especially considering many of the battles before the revolution were involving land and other prospects/holdings Washington had. Having a profit motive definitely makes me doubt his actions.
While he was a general he was known for his lavish spending and corruption. So much so that when he became President Congress denied his request for an expense account. Someone even wrote a book about it. His $450k expense account after the war adjusted for inflation would be close to $20 million today. He was also more than half-way to being a billionaire with net worth of close to $600 million adjusted for inflation at his time of death.
The revolutionary war wasn’t revolutionary at all. In fact, they ended up with a system eerily similar to the system they left. Wholesale copying the legal system amongst many other similarities. I think this is very damning when you compare modern day white washing and propaganda of their actions. They weren’t fighting against corruption, they were the corruption.
They weren’t doing it for the common good. They were wealthy individuals who wanted complete control. They created a country born out of violence and lies with a government system designed to embrace their corruption but prevent others from doing the same.
Their concern about corruption was just as much of a projection as we have now with compromised politicians calling it out. I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day and certainly many of the things he and others said at the time weren’t necessarily wrong. When you put it in perspective and critically analyze it though you begin to see the bullshit.
I thought corruption meant using power in a dishonest (or at least doing something illegal) way for explicitly personal gain (and not something that was, for example, beneficial to your citizens too. Colonialism can be evil but not corrupt, no?). Similarly for the treatment and holding of slaves; evil but not corrupt.
Your point about the expense account fits, thank you. I’ll gently note that if we have the expense book, he didn’t lie (?), and that it’s a book by a comedian first, historian second. I’ll try to look at it more closely.
My bit about his peers was specifically in the context of corruption. I think you’ve misunderstood me.
Benefitting from an economic boom that enriched many many folks (America went from a backwater to a superpower) is not evidence of corruption, or even particularly suspicious. It should not surprise you that protest leaders often stand the most to lose from the status quo; being self interested is not the same as corruption I think. Sometimes the right thing is also right for you (eg, organizers of mutual aid often need aid, this doesn’t make them corrupt).
I also don’t think motive is sufficient; if someone implemented a higher minimum wage that is generally not corruption, even if they only do it because their children will personally get a raise. The use of power should also be illegitimate.
If you can’t connect the dots that the founding fathers used terrorism for their financial gain then you are perhaps bereft of insight.
Concentration of wealth is one of the huge issues we are facing right now as a culture. We can see this was a problem from the start. A government that was designed to only benefit the wealthy for the wealthy.
I get your are just acting like a bootlicker. My only question is what it tastes like.
Unfortunately, it is.
Politics is war by other means
Yeah, they’re shameless hypocrites, it’s not a surprise
In getting elected on a ‘purge the deep state!’ platform, they’ve created the deep state.
Yeah, the dumb ass magat voters kind of pulled a self fulfilling prophecy on themselves
deleted by creator
If a “deep state” exists as they have always claimed, then where the fuck are they??? They should have stopped this by now.
The most accurate use of the deep state in the usa is israel
Gaslight
Obstruct
Project
Also Group Of Pedophiles works
I like to call them Greedy Old Pedophiles.
Haha, I like that one, that’s good and well descriptive of those fucking monsters
Look everyone, nothing happened. Trump’s hand was never bruised and he was just really busy for a few days. Putin definitely didn’t break his hand in Alaska. That’s ridiculous and no one is saying it.
Every accusation is a confession when it comes to conservatives.
When haven’t it been projection with conservatives?
Yeah but it was also.true lmao
Which it turns out they were, though I think it was more denial than any active deception.
Yeah, but it’s virtuous when THEY do it.
It would be funny and take all the criticism thrown at Biden re: his advanced age and behaviors and bring them up with Trump.
If you want to see some heads spin, raise some of those. Stuff that “just made sense” with Biden i.e. “Do we really want someone tuning out?” “He got a name wrong in a speech.” “He looks old.” Now, apply that to Trump and all of a sudden it “doesn’t make any sense”.
I feel like there is a certain amount of hypocrisy required to advocate Trump. Similar to the Party in 1984, part of the success is being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time and consider that logical and reasoned.
As an outsider it was quite weird seing a really, really old person in bad health calling out another really really old person because of age. Gaslighting I guess.
P R O J E C T I O N!
It’s the GQP’s playbook.
