Is that Benedict Cucumberpatch?
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@petzl is obviously referring to posts like this one. Or maybe this one.
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Nice stalking. (Aside from the willfulness involved in reading to extract the meaning you want out of what you’re reading.)
Sorry if being reminded of what you said makes you uncomfortable. If you want to snidely dismiss the idea that people were making the equivalences @petzl described, you have to be prepared for examples to get dredged up. The quote (Clinton=syphillis, Trump=gonorrhea, or maybe you meant it the other way around) came up in a simple search.
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Framing an existential threat in terms of how to deal with an incompetent president, is sort of like using assembly language to tell your alarm clock what time to wake you. The legal doctrine of necessity is going to be all we have to cover our actions, until it can be made legal after the fact: just like when the founding fathers roamed the earth.
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Syphilis and gonorrhea aren’t equally bad. And I do stand by the earlier assertion that Clinton and her ilk have been the (neoliberal) disease of which Trump is a symptom. That doesn’t mean that they’re the same, nor that we’re no worse off with Trump than we would have been with Clinton.
Am I off your hook now, or do you still want to keep jerking me around?
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There is lots of culpability for this electoral outcome, from the efforts of the DNC to keep the range of candidates small to the many bad campaign decisions of the eventual nominee to the attacks from self-serving 3rd party candidates to interference by the FBI and Putin to the nonstop free publicity the traditional media gave to Trump (coupled with their drive to create an illusion of balanced coverage rather than simply report truth) and the relentless repetition in nontraditional media of false allegations that Clinton was corrupt and a tool of Wall Street (or sometimes that Wall Street was a tool of Clinton, it was hard to keep these two incompatible accusation straight). Some of these were far more problematic than others, but Trump’s win was so razor-thin that probably any of them could have made the difference. Repetition of the utterly ridiculous idea that Clinton was as bad as Trump (or almost as bad as Trump, or really bad though in a different way) created an environment where many people (especially young people on the left) stayed home on election day, thinking the magnitude of the choice was not large enough to warrant taking time off work or school or facebook, or - worse - voted for Stein. So, in that sense none of the people who contributed to any of these reasons for Trump’s win is off the hook.
As a Sanders supporter who argued quite a bit before the convention both online and in real space (including political venues) with people like @petzl, I have to include myself here.
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Or, as I like to think of it,
Clinton and Trump are most certainly not equally bad.
Downing a 64oz vodka/benzo/oxycodone cocktail is also certainly not equal to being bathed in acid and slowly dismembered with a rusty saw.
But, after the fact, the difference really doesn’t matter that much to the final outcome.
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I don’t see why you needed to delete the post. You could have amended it instead if you had changed your mind, for example. You didn’t say anything wrong.
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Or crying over the end of civilization. One person’s spilled milk…
Just to remind you all:
Key Steps on the Path to [non-violent] Revolution
- Develop a strategy for winning freedom and a vision of the society you want
- Overcome fear by small acts of resistance
- Use colours and symbols to demonstrate unity of resistance
- Learn from historical examples of the successes of non-violent movements
- Use non-violent “weapons”
- Identify the dictatorship’s pillars of support and develop a strategy for undermining each
- Use oppressive or brutal acts by the regime as a recruiting tool for your movement
- Isolate or remove from the movement people who use or advocate violence
Courtesy Gene Sharp, “From Dictatorship to Democracy”.
Full text available here: http://www.cfic.org.uk/media/From%20dictatorship%20to%20democracy.pdf
[I have never in my life previewed recommending this text to Americans]
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As the relevant but somewhat crude saying goes: “Spit in one hand, wish in the other, and see which fills first.” I would go so far as to say that most people would make a better president than Trump, but this is the reality we are confronted with. Pointing fingers amongst ourselves and arguing about how Clinton might have been isn’t going to change anything.
Those who are certain that it is the end of civilization, should IMO go all the way to force a change, because we don’t have much else to lose. Life is too short to trust our planet to greed.
Audit trail. Are people actually getting worried about posts? I have previously edited details of BB posts when situations were getting difficult and the wrong people were aware of my nickname (not, of course, BB people).
Speaking of which - might we have a freshly registered batch of Trumpites reading and watching?
No, R’as was much smarter. Although both have attractive daughters… 
I’m not from this planet, just here for a little adventure tourism/anthropological study. 
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There are those who believe that life here began out there.
Are you referring to biological life? My belief system allows for life and intelligence that go beyond the mere biological.
Could be. I try to avoid believing anything for any significant duration. Yet, there are decisions to be made!
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I think I should apologise, and suggest that it’s an allusion to the redacted WarrenEllis.com usage of ‘What is best in life, Conan?’ The lead train is to encounter itself simultaneously at speed in all directions.
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I read your post as being very critical of mine, (“then that would be offensive”)and had the impression that a number of other people agreed. I think I have said in the past that I regard this as a kind of peer review - if people disapprove of my posts, they shouldn’t be published. The Internet contains enough junk, I prefer to self-censor and try not to add too much.
