US Presidential Primaries

[ManaMan]

Go Trump Go.

No one else will step up.

Ha, you know you love your pretty-boy PM Trudeau too much to cheat on him with Trump.

[ManaMan]

Now Obama's officially endorsed Hillary. Will Sanders back out or is he going to try for a coup at the convention? He is a socialist calling for a revolution after all...

[Shrinweck]

As long as he doesn't run as a third party and he ends up telling his supporters that they should vote for Clinton like he has loosely implied he would I don't really care what he does. The point of his candidacy should have always been to get his ideas out there, show that there is a demand for what he espouses, and to, at the end of the day, help the Democrats as a party. Winning was likely never going to happen. Sanders has enough of a conscience that I'm sure he'll figure something out. It's too bad there's so much toxicity in his supporters.

It is funny to hear Trump liken the endorsement to 'four more years of Obama' considering the last two Republican candidates have basically been them running George Bush again and again. Win or lose it will be interesting to see where a new direction takes them.

[Julius Seeker]

Yeah, I was wondering why Bernie Sanders supporters are so aggressively screechy and/or dramatic? In my opinion, he was the best candidate; but not all of his supporters are the best sort of people in a democracy. They're kind of like cultists.

At least they're not as bad as the Clueless Clexa Cult who raised several thousand dollars to purchase billboards to place all over LA freeways to express rage at Lexa being killed off on The 100.

https://mobile.twitter.com/shaun_stegal ... 9290993664

Spoiler: show

What show fans won't accept realize is that the actress worked for Fear the Walking Dead, and therefore could not be on The 100 as per the contract she had with AMC. They are just crazy and rage filled.

Also, they're completely ignoring the fact that there's a gay couple on the show that is still fine. I'm willing to bet most of these angry lesbians are actually teenaged guys.

[Replay]

Yeah, I was wondering why Bernie Sanders supporters are so aggressively screechy and/or dramatic? In my opinion, he was the best candidate; but not all of his supporters are the best sort of people in a democracy. They're kind of like cultists.

Because a lot of people are wasting their lives in apathy and self-interest - while his supporters understood that the world is heading for serious trouble if the kinds of forces he spoke out against are not stopped, Seek.

I have tried over and over and over again to expose here the kinds of murders, graft, and fraud that Wall Street has been engaging in, as have his supporters.

Mostly what we got in response is "you're crazy" or "I don't care, because it's not happening to me" - and forgive me for saying this, but I think very much that you don't care because it's not happening to you.

I got off the Bernie Bus mostly because he did a terrible job running the VA and his wife did a terrible job running Burlington College, but at least he wasn't a con man, a liar, or a murderer.

The two candidates we're left in the race with can't particularly claim those credentials anymore.

At least there [sic] not as bad as the Clueless Clexa Cult who raised several thousand dollars to purchase billboards to place all over LA freeways to express rage at Lexa being killed off on The 100.

*They're.

How did you misspell this one while spelling it *correctly* not just a sentence before it?

Attention to detail still matters. As a friend of mine put it, it's the difference between "feeling you're nuts" and "feeling your nuts".

Back on topic, if you *aren't* angry when people steal money and life from the innocent - then I have to accuse you of apathy in response to your own post accusing the Sanders movement of "screechiness".

[ManaMan]

Srsly dude, chill the fuck out. You're just shitting over everyone now. I understand that you and Kali have a feud and that he tries to start fights for fun but you're flipping out at everyone else here like Oracle & Seeker if they say something you even slightly disagree with. Even me (remember Stephanie Tanner's boobs?)

Keep in mind:

• People *are* going to say things you disagree with.
• People *are* going to disagree with things you say.
• You will virtually *never* change anyone's mind in an internet argument.

You seem to think you're on some kind of crusade to save the world. You're not going to do it on this forum. People are just here to shoot the shit and talk about games/movies/politics when they should be working. I'm sure you'll start shitting on me now. Multiple successive posts too.

[Julius Seeker]

There, I fixed my typo

[Replay]

Srsly dude, chill the fuck out. You're just shitting over everyone now. I understand that you and Kali have a feud and that he tries to start fights for fun but you're flipping out at everyone else here like Oracle & Seeker if they say something you even slightly disagree with. Even me (remember Stephanie Tanner's boobs?)

Keep in mind:

• People *are* going to say things you disagree with.
• People *are* going to disagree with things you say.
• You will virtually *never* change anyone's mind in an internet argument.

You seem to think you're on some kind of crusade to save the world. You're not going to do it on this forum. People are just here to shoot the shit and talk about games/movies/politics when they should be working. I'm sure you'll start shitting on me now. Multiple successive posts too.

Yes Mana, I get it. And actually I have no desire to "start shitting on you". I respect you greatly.

It's just that disrespect inspires disrespect. "Screechy and dramatic" felt to me like a way of marginalizing everything Bernie's campaign stood for; but maybe I overreacted.

--------------

Here is the "cult of Bernie" explained in a nutshell - a lot of people really feel like life has been made unbearable for people at the lower tier of our societal strata; and unbearably corrupt at the top end - and I think there's a lot of evidence to support that. I don't care if people agree with things I've posted here or not, but at this point I feel it's an urgent matter of societal preservation to say it.

So do many of Bernie's supporters. There are fucked up bad people all over the place playing willy-nilly with people's lives, health, bankbooks - and the system that's supposed to prevent it or bring justice against it is still broken. It is hard not to be shrill while telling people "Actual psychopaths and murderers are running the roost." Noticing that things are broken and that bad people and killers are becoming billionaires, powerful politicians, and other systemic backbones of power tends to produce both fear and anger - and a desire to be heard.

For instance - I would be shrill if a serial killer had moved in up the street, and was seen hauling buckets of money from empires of drugs and crime, and I'd seen him personally do in about three people - and no one on the block believed me.

Well, there's a lot of that sentiment among Sanders supporters on a national level. He was a near-lone voice yelling in the wilderness about how bad the bad boys of American finance and politics were getting, for a few years.

His decision to quietly effectively end the campaign and reach out to the Clinton camp will probably cause the disintegration of the movement to some extent; but it remains out there and will recoalesce around other reform candidates.

--------------

The status quo is unbearable to many people, and I'm not sure that's an opinion that's so wrong to have these days. Rot in societies has ended dominant empires before; and the United States - well, in some ways our Union is strong, but I am becoming a student of history astute enough to recognize what I see as potentially unsustainable systemic risk and corruption in our society right now. I think there is this perception that the Obama era just erased the larger legacy of the Bush era for some people, and that's just not true. We're bearing unimaginable national debt, which is *not* decreasing - we're still mired in some shoddy mixture of unilateral war and "peacekeeping" in a bunch of places we shouldn't be in, but will probably just end up staying in forever, including Middle Eastern locations that seem to positively resist civilization/peace...

I mean, maybe we can really work it out, stay positive, and help the nation succeed. I wouldn't have bet that a U.S.-Japanese occupation back in 1948 was going to produce two countries that were genuinely friends and crucial allies by 2016.

But this ain't the way. Some marketplace in Iraq just blew up again the other day. That ain't new, but what the fuck are *we* still doing with our hands in the hornet's nest? I feel like I'm trapped in some kind of "Groundhog Day" experience in the U.S. now - it's perpetually 2003, and that year wants its headlines back every year.

Doing this same kind of thing over and over that got us here is, as the psychologists like to put it, insanity.

[ManaMan]

That was really well put.

That would've been a great reply to Seeker. You are too quick to make things personal. You bring up past personal and collective grievances and insult grammar/spelling. You get mean. Then you act as though this is something productive, like you're actually fixing the world by doing it. I guess that's my beef with how you've been responding to people. We like having you contribute (lord knows we need more people here) and you're one of the top contributors.

[Replay]

I get it, Mana, and I will try harder to avoid my mean streaks.

I just wish that some here would realize that they have mean streaks too.

I've taken a non-trivial amount grief here over the years; and not all of it is due to my own mean streak. I tend to give what I get; and I've had a lot of shit slung at me too. I have gone through arguments here that have resulted in personal information being posted about me, including past home addresses - I've been compared to a terrorist due to my political views, even though they are actually more stridently anti-war than most here, which saddens me greatly and is a dangerous thing to allow others to do to me without speaking in my own defense in an increasingly "Minority Report" era - and one argument resulted in my getting literally surveilled by Kali, who has also "joked" that he could "have everyone here killed", though he made it specific earlier that he could just "have me killed" as well.

No one else on the board has had to go through most of that. I recognize that political activism is not easy and that there will always be pushback, but a lot of that didn't have to happen. I don't think the board is psychologically well right now.

I'm quite willing to work on my mean streak. I want others to work on their own mean streaks too. This isn't what I wanted for the Shrine.

[ManaMan]

One last wheeze out of the primaries: Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president effectively ending his campaign.

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/12/12159062/b ... ry-clinton

Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that. She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States