Best of Unstuck

BestOf · December 6, 2019, 6:12pm

We’ve had a lot of submissions, so thanks to those tagging posts.
Still trying to figure out the best way to make everything readable ITT, bear with me.

ITV: Impeachment Television

ITV: Impeachment Television

So what exactly are the Dems supposed to do? It’s been said numerous times that impeachment is a political process not a criminal process.

For starters, if the roles were reversed, the GOP would be blanketing the airwaves with pro impeachment ads. Like where the fuck is Tom Steyer now? #NeedToImpeach

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what comes next. I thought about making a new thread, even. But like he’s going to be impeached, then he’s almost certainly going to be acquitted in the Senate in like February. This gives him the total green light to do anything he wants in the 2020 election with zero ramifications until 2021, and if he wins zero ramifications until 2025. We all know what that means.

So we’re about to enter this new phase of just all out political war. The Dem nominee WILL be investigated by the DOJ. The president WILL use the office to pressure foreign countries to investigate the Dem nominee. The president WILL try to get foreign countries to hack for him, to cut deals to help him, etc, etc. Money WILL be funneled from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel to the Trump campaign. Facts will be totally disregarded. The amount of mud that is flying from the right will be orders of magnitude more than we’ve ever seen.

So what should the Dems do and what will the Dems do? There’s no way they do what they should do, imo, which is to match the fervor and intensity but do so legally. They should already be preparing now, and they’re not. They should be going for the transcripts of every call with MBS, Netanyahu, Putin, etc. They should be going through the courts now to enforce subpoenas so that maybe it plays out in time to have major public testimony about various misdeeds in June through November of 2020. They should be lining this stuff up now. Make sure the headlines are not like, “DOJ Investigates Biden/Sanders/Warren/Pete for _____________.” Make sure the headlines are about explosive testimony that’s damning for Trump. You have to win that battle, or the Comey letter is going to look like child’s play.

What else should they be doing? They should be making sure Trump is charged by NY and other states shortly after he’s acquitted in the Senate. Is he indictable? Well we should sure as shit find out, let’s make SCOTUS rule on that in 2020. Why wait? Is there any doubt the GOP would have charged Obama in like Alabama for some state crime if they had the chance???

You need the shit you’re slinging back at him to be a level more serious than the shit he’s slinging at you. If it’s an indictment in a court of law, hey, that’s not partisan politics that’s a GRAND JURY OF HIS PEERS. It’s a nice bonus that it’s ACTUALLY in the pursuit of justice as well. That it’s all legal and above board.

Meanwhile, as you keep turning the screws on him, you increase the number of unforced errors he’s going to make. All of this should be going on while the nominee totally ignores it and hammers HEALTHCARE AND JOBS AND HEALTHCARE AND JOBS AND MONEY AND JOBS AND HEALTHCARE AND MONEY AND HOPE AND YES WE CAN AND LIFE IS GOING TO BE SO GOOD FOR YOU WHEN I WIN.

Let House Oversight, Intel and Judiciary go in on him. And, while we’re at it, clear those committees of anyone who isn’t up to the task and load them up with total bulldogs who do not have future presidential ambitions. I want Maxine Waters chairing some of these hearings, so move her over or find a way to put them in Financial Services. In fact, change the house rules to bring in lawyers to do the questioning and bring in the best, most cunning, most assholic lawyer possible. Or let Robert de Niro do it, that’d be fun. This is fucking political war, democracy hangs in the balance.

On 11/4/20, there should be no dry powder anywhere within a mile of these Democratic investigations. Fire it all.

And obviously there should be targeted ad campaigns to suppress Republican turnout. There should be Super PACS that are not at all connected to the candidate that are being run by people like Tom Steyer that are running ads painting Trump as an out of touch scummy elitist who’s scamming the good Christian folks of God’s country. Has he paid for abortions for his mistresses? Who can be sure? Many people are saying it! Let’s dredge up some of the disparaging shit he’s said about Pence that ties into religion. You think Obama’s line about clinging to guns and Bibles was bad? What about this other shit Trump said?

But I have a feeling the Dems are about to walk into a fight like this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCWjo1ymhGs

Expecting to play thumb war. One, two, three, four I declare a… Sorry, my dude, you just got hit in the face with a trident. Why’d you bring nothing more dangerous than opposable thumbs to a street fight with tridents and swords?

Source

Fall LC thread

Fall LC thread

Look, I am not so hot take that I don’t understand differences in passed down beliefs steeped in organization, tradition and culture vs a relatively new dumb ass theory. That said, it is hand in fucking hand. The rejection of science in order to protect religious beliefs is partly what fuels this phenomenon. If you are going to reject evolution you can just as easily reject the evidence that the world is not flat.

The percentage of people who believe in evolution for valid scientific reasons is vanishingly small. A lot of intelligent-design type arguments against evolution are basically sound arguments that just happen to be wrong due to the mindboggling fact that the earth has been in existence for billions of years, which is nuts.

Evolution is even a bad example, because the theory itself is basically plausible. Think about what well-informed people believe about cosmology, which is broadly speaking this:

The universe is extremely old (OK!)

The universe didn’t always exist, and it started out smaller than a single atom. (Wait, what?)

Virtually instantaneously (i.e., expansion time: human lifespan << human lifespan : total age of the universe), the universe expanded to something close to its current size due to something called an inflation field (Don’t ask what an inflation field is, because no one has any idea)

After that, the universe evolved according to the normal physical laws we see on earth, although the scales are very different. (Whew, glad that weird shit is behind us)

Except also, the only kind of matter we have any direct experience of is basically insignificant, and a solid majority of the stuff in the universe is invisible fairy dust that no one has ever seen or has convincingly explained the nature of. (…)

Also, there is a mysterious energy that permeates the universe that makes gravity work backwards for no known reason. (You’re the guys who say that flat-earth makes no sense?)

Again, I’m not saying that fairy-dust theory is false, it’s apparently true (or true-ish, or a stand-in for the truth). The point is that virtually everyone who believes this crazy shit doesn’t believe it for well-justified empirical reasons. The explanation for inflation has to do with a mathematical property called “anisotropy” that can be sussed out only through an exhaustingly precise examination of the static you see when you tune an old-fashioned radio or television to a dead channel. (<-- This is precisely true!)

What actually happens is that people’s empirical beliefs are obtained, in almost all cases, by ingesting the pronouncements of authoritative figures. There are many excellent reasons why science guys are a much better source to obtain scientific beliefs from than the Pope, but it’s a serious error to assume that a person’s choice of epistemic authority figure tells you much about that person’s character. For the most part, people just follow the authority figures that their social context tells them to follow. The only people you can really get some information about is people who were born into one social context but chose to adopt the epistemology of another–people who deconverted from a serious religious sect (not Episcopalianism) or joined a cult.

Flat-earthers are remarkable not because their beliefs are weird (the earth does look flat!), but because they are unsanctioned. The strangeness isn’t what they believe, it’s that they came to believe something that is unsanctioned by all elements of society.

Source

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