Guy Chamberlin

Yeah, I'm rooting for Ukraine and wanting to celebrate this, but just look at that landscape. War is f#&%ing awful.

Seriously. WTF? I mean, I remember back when the Democrats nominated notorious centrist and reach-across-the-aisle guy Joe Biden, and the Right treated him like Karl Marx. Or are you simply pointing out that the Republican Party has abandoned competence and decency in order to run candidates that further inflame liberals? Remember, we did go down the Cheney road. Nobody on the Left forgot her pre-Trump record. But many on the right considered her turn on Trump a betrayal of the party. That would be you. Isn't it a bit weird that your "gotcha!" is actually an admission of your party's march to extremism?

And we still didn't know how big the fish really was. Look out. You may have swallowed "exonerated" without chewing.

I was at the game for that last clip: Westbrook walks seven steps up court without dribbling. Like it's a perfectly normal thing. You couldn't believe it just happened. Place was howling. But I'm certainly not gonna hate on the NBA for missing a few calls. There are plenty of traveling calls every game, and last night I actually saw them call Jordan Poole for palming.

The Nuggets reminded me of the vintage Warriors. Trailing by double-digits means nothing. Just hang in, stay true to your game, chip away, and then pull away at the end because you are the superior team.

I mean, Archy's not wrong. Neither is BRB. The success of Donald Trump has hundreds of fathers and 2016 will be studied forever. Personally, I think Donald Trump won because he had his own TV show, and it was written to make him look smart.

Now you're reading the thread titles?

I'm just suggesting he had some savvy professional campaign operatives doing both advance work and clean up for him in 2016. I don't know if the sycophants he has left can pull off the less-insane tack he's going to need.

Are you going to tell KanekoaTheGreat that he's not pure Republican? He's also pimping Charlie Kirk. In what Utopia does Charlie Kirk even exist?

I have to remind myself, but despite the many deplorable things Trump said prior to and during his initial 2016 campaign, there was a campaign apparatus around him that pulled it together in the final months of the general election. Trump may not have won the Hillary debates on any intellectual level, but he more than held his own as a figurehead and message manager. He handled his coronation at the Republican National Convention much better than might be expected, and the supporting speakers were much more credible and level-headed than they would be today. The Sunday before the November election the campaign made a huge buy on NFL broadcasts, and the very well-crafted commercials were all "it's not about Donald Trump. It's about us" and IIRC, Trump himself was barely featured. Someone in charge knew what they were doing, and for the first time it occurred to me: he's gonna win. Yet to be seen whether skilled campaign pros will step in this year, or if Trump will be working with bargain basement loyalists playing to a radicalized base.

The flame could mean many different things. What does it mean to you? 1) The poster is guilty of flaming 2) That's a hot take! 3) I'm hot for the poster 4) Burn! 5) Let's just set fire to the whole f#&%ing thing

Well, and the Republicans who rely on illegal immigrants for cheap labor. Surely you know rural Latinos are no lock to vote Democrat.

Psssst! You're on the Just Normal American Utopia thread. Why do you keep cocking it up with the same tired s#!t from multiple other threads?

The other side of this is that everyone takes advantage of Democrat programs that help them ladder up to security and prosperity. Then when they get rich enough, the a$$h@!es become Republicans and pull the ladder away from those beneath them.

Did you miss the part where it says athletes are statistically less violent than the general public? Boycotting professions according to their felony rates and domestic abuse cases could really limit a person.

Step two is a paid entourage. Step three is buying jewelry for the women you cheat on. Year 10 you are trying to trade on your fame as a Toyota dealer in Athens, Georgia.

If you've never sampled his posts in P&R, you may not be shocked to know they're even worse.

Hilarious and ludicrous and embarrassing. https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/in-which-i-win-a-debate-against-google?utm_campaign=email-post&r=b2ffx&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email In Which I Win a Debate Against Google Gemini The AI may be capable of learning JEFF MAURER FEB 21, 2024 Above: One of the images created when I asked it to create a picture of the Homestead Grays in the 1930s. Subscribed Google’s chatbot Gemini (formerly Bard) became a Twitter punching bag this week when users noticed that it’s extremely difficult to get the AI to generate an image of a white person. This tweet appears to have been patient zero: From there, Twitter was off and running: We also learned that Gemini has obvious double standards but is also programmed with enough chutzpah to lecture you: I don’t even feel like telling jokes about this. I mean, folks: The guy asked for a German soldier in 1943 and the AI gave him a picture of a young Asian woman dressed as a Nazi. I can’t top that. But I did want to experience Gemini’s double standards for myself. The chatbot and I had an exchange that went in a direction that I did not expect it to go — that exchange is pasted below. The only context you need is that the Homestead Grays were a Negro League baseball team and white teams like the New York Yankees did not start integrating until the late 1940s.

Almost every point here is wrong. Barack Obama pointedly avoided publicizing the intel he was getting from the intelligence community on Trump and Associates shady dealings and Moscow's social media intervention because he thought it would actually backfire as a campaign ploy. When Hillary Clinton wondered aloud in the debates why Putin would prefer Donald Trump, it was a very good question that has since been answered: Trump had Putin's back from Day One, and steered America to the anti-NATO position Putin could barely dream of. Do you honestly think Putin doesn't care which President he gets to play with? As for that Steele Dossier? Yeah, that was good campaign fodder because it was so salacious. While you like to remember it being disproven, take away some of that salacious stuff, and it mostly bolstered the case that Trump was balls deep in Russia and Putin had every intention of helping him win the Presidency. Fun fact: the dossier was originally funded by never-Trump Republicans, including a Marco Rubio supporter. Regardless of party affiliation, anyone with a brain could see Trump was a national security disaster waiting to happen. Several key allegations made in June 2016 about the Russian government's efforts to get Trump elected were later described as "prescient"[7] because they were corroborated six months later in the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence[8][9] and the Mueller Report, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton;[8][10] that he personally ordered an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process"; that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties;[8] and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents.[11][12] While Steele's documents played a significant role in initially highlighting the general friendliness between Trump and the Putin administration, the veracity of specific allegations is highly variable. Some have been publicly confirmed,[9][13][8][10] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[14][15] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[16][17][18] In summary: collusion is a serious charge BECAUSE of its potential for letting a foreign government exert undue influence on U.S. affairs. In 2024 America, 8 years removed from the Steele Dossier, the Republican Party and its media mouthpieces have taken their lead from standard-bearer Donald Trump, following an untraditional path of Russian appeasement, NATO bashing, and increasingly Zelensky bashing, while potential Trump VP candidate and major GOP influencer Tucker Carlson travels to Russia, gives Putin a blatant propaganda platform, and literally celebrates the glory of modern Russia while admonishing the U.S. as the lesser country. Un-fcking-believable. This is the s#!t Jane Fonda was roasted for. So yes, the GOP has a Russia problem. But like I said.....take Russia off the table completely and there are still tons of rock solid reasons to fear a Trump presidency. Just knowing you plant to write-in Ron DeSantis gives me hope for the future.

I'm just trying to move beyond Archy's fixation on the Mueller Report to the much larger collusion taking place in broad daylight as we speak. (Although I will pause to note you forgot to mention it produced 8 felony convictions, including Donald Trump's campaign manager. That's something that shouldn't happen if it's nothing)

I chose my words carefully. Answer the f#&%ing question.

I read somewhere that almost every founding religious text contains a minor variation on The Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's so simple, so relatable, so easy to put into practice. It renders the rest of religious teachings almost superfluous. But it's a hard rule to fully adhere to, because at some level we reserve the right to want more, give less, and feel superior to others.

I'm guessing that many if not most Christians would like for the United States to be a Christian nation, and many of those would not mind if we went ahead and made that official. This is what separation of church and state was designed to avoid. It's worked out pretty well, as most of the Commandments are common sense directives that align with basic human decency, and forgoing a Nativity Manger on the public square does not prohibit the practicing of religion or celebration of Christmas. But I'm also guessing that human history is cyclical, and we seem to be entering a cycle that is agitating for a battle of morality, goaded by political forces seeking control of the masses. Full disclosure: I'm an agnostic. My personal belief is that we might get along better if we admitted what we don't really know.

Are you telling me the Republican party doesn't have a Russia problem right now? Or is this typical Archy, where you put all your eggs in an old semantic basket and pretend you're not wrong?

The problem to me is that if a religion -- the dominant religion -- believes in the omniscience, agenda, and inevitability of its God, it holds a literal and figurative superiority over non-believers that can't be shaken. And of course there's a long, bloody history of seemingly minor divisions in Christian and Muslim sects driving the faithful to holy wars. This thread is already parsing Biblical passages to offer as evidence, but what of the people who don't consider the Bible the rule of law? Or the Torah? Or the Qur'an? How many sacred texts are riddled with mixed messages, or interpreted quite differently between true believers? What's with the abrupt tonal change from the Old to New Testament, like it's a completely different author? Faith. Community. Purpose. Belonging. Believing. That's all great stuff, as is anything that brings people together to consider our common lot. But religion, especially in the public square, is too often about control. What we're seeing right now is an attack on the seats of knowledge, be it academia, journalism, science, or civics. Which means it's also an attack on facts, the kind that might be applied to making decisions. It has often been the role of organized religion to undercut and demonize any institution competing for the hearts and minds of people, and that sentiment has been resurgent and particularly well-organized in recent years. The loving Christians, including several on this board, share my concerns and speak intelligently and compellingly on the subject. But they seem to be a minority of Christians at the moment, and few dare raise the political implications from the pulpit.