I was rejected from Oxbridge 4 times.
Turns out all I needed to do was bin the old fella.
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Weâve come a long way. Now ânormalâ gays can discriminate the âabnormalâ ones. 
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I think it is simpler than that. I donât think @Nobluff actually lives in the US.
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Nor do most of us, but the women I know, no matter where they are, feel very strongly about this issue, just as men would feel about the government legislating about our bodies.
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It is WAY worse than that. He essentially gaslighted her into the suicide with a year long campaign where he played on her existing depression and used all his Kenedy powers to alienate her from her friends and family. The story is astonishing in its coldness and inhumanity of his behavior towards her as any human being, let alone as the mother of (some of) his kids
Think about it. The primary defense of the awful things he says and advocates for is âyou cant believe him when he says thingsâ. According to these supporters his entire platform is a series of things different to what he says because we cannot believe what he says. Yet in an election where the primary issue is trust, he is the guy. And no attempt to reconcile that is made at all.
This support of Trump is a textbook case of someone tying themselves in intellectual knots after emotionally deciding on a position and then working backwards to find intellectual justifications for it that dont exist and so a clunky story has to be created to justify it.
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I think a big part of it is the economic driver of our news is personality. All of the professional incentives are for journos are to cover stories in a way that places their personal value in being the one covering the story at the center of their coverage. It is why so much of our coverage is not about what happened today, but what do I, the smartest person in the room whose column you must read first not the column from that other egg head at the other paper, think this means for the voters. There is just so much more room to demonstrate your personal brand and value when approaching stories like that than there is very just a straight âcandidate says X. Reality says Yâ.
You can argue chicken or egg in terms of whether the news organizations are responding to a real demand from consumers or whether they have created that perceived demand by training them to believe that is what good coverage is. But itâs pretty clear to me this is the problem. I used to make a routine of watching one particular news show at 5pm as a way of catching up with the days news. At some point in the 2016 the format of it changed but I kept watching it out of habit. Then one day there was a big story about something Ted Cruz had done related to the 2016 RNC. If you recall, he was the last man standing in the GOP nomination process and was still strongly opposing Trump at the time (amusingly with Kelly Anne Conway running his campaign blanketing the airwaves about how self evidently awful Trump was). He had seemingly put into motion something designed to get convention delegates to switch to him, but to this day I dont know what it was. For the full hour all the program talked about was what the boffins thought it would mean. What the impact would be. Whether it would help or hurt Cruz for the 2020 race (the assumption Clinton would be President). The 6pm show never covered it at all.
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What a remarkably patient and good post.
Well done.
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Regarding the new Epstein tapes, it is worth recalling a guy called Alex Acosta.
He was a Bush era establishment guy who had worked in senior positions in the DOJ, ultimately landing at Floridaâs Southern District. Trump appointed him as his first Transportation Secretary, but a couple of years into the term details of his handing of the initial Epstein case came to light. It was already known that he was in charge of giving Epstein the plea deal he received, but it then came out that he had violated the rights of the victims in doing it, sealed the case, and in the process obstructed ongoing FBI investigations into the case. He was ultimately forced to step down and just slunk away without consequences.
The obvious question then is what incentive did Trump have for giving someone who helped cover up the extent of Epsteinâs crimes a plumb cabinet gig.
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To anyone who says, âVoting for Trump doesnât make me racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, or fascistâ, I say, âNo, but it makes you an enabler, which is just as bad.â
âŚand, yes, I have said this to a few people.
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A black woman from SF , old civil rights activist , who I used to be very friendly with stopped watching the national news in 2016 when he was elected. She was one of the most tolerant , educated and polite people Iâve ever known and knew lots of Republicans , some of whom she considered close friends. Gradually , as he revealed himself to be the person we all knew he was (incidentally she had actually had dinner one time , with others , with Maya Angelou in the sixties) , that tolerance evaporated and she told me that she no longer cared what rationale people gave for supporting Trump. They may not have been overt racists or misogynists themselves but implicit in their support for him was that his belief in white supremacy and his male chauvinism just wasnât a deal-breaker for them. She decided then that she simply couldnât respect or trust anyone like that.
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I am not surprised that people cannot tell the difference, but I continue to be disappointed at low a bar people I once respected fail to clear in understanding the problem with even passive participation in these things.
A little while back we were out with friends when a guy, an acquaintance of mine but close friend of one of the women in our group, started being outwardly, unambiguously racist to Mrs Limieâs face. It wasnt a misunderstanding where he said something he didnt realize he shouldnt have. It was just pointing at someone who was different and doing what was essentially a ching chong chinaman routine at her because he thought it was funny. She made a dignified point of telling him it was unacceptable and needed to stop and when it didnât we just said our goodbyes and left. The following morning she took up with my friend who was standing there the entire time, smirking through the whole thing. She didnât blame this woman for her friendâs racism, but wanted to point out how unacceptable her supportive reaction to it was. The point was never understoodâŚâItâs not big deal, he is not a bad guy. He was just being silly. Why are you targeting me? It was not me saying it.â The fact she was willing to let one of her supposed friends be subjected to that and even get a little of enjoyment out of the naughtiness of it is completely lost on her as being a problem. She is no longer someone we consider a friend.
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Donât worry, someone will be along shortly to tell you that you were just being overly sensitive and taking offence on behalf of someone elseâŚ
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Itâs a weird phenomenon, where this backlash against âwokeismâ now means nothing can be racist, homophobic, mysogonistic unless youâre basically physically attacking someone or at least calling for that. You also canât be a fascist unless you are in fact Adolf Hitler.
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Should be stickied at the top of this thread.
Yeah, the Hitler stuff is such a bad faith distraction. Americans need fascism to be so tightly wrapped up in comparisons to Hitler because we are so familiar with our version of it we dont recognize it as being fascist. People forget (ignore?) that before the war the Nazis sent agents to the US to learn lessons on how to implement their ideas from the Jim Crowe South, something that was still present as the US sent fighters off to war to âfight fascismâ. Hitler had portraits of and took inspiration from Henry Ford.
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But its not an issue of healthcare because there are exceptions for health and life of the motherâŚ
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Meanwhile theyâre worrying about Springfieldâs dogsâŚthatâs a federal issue but letâs give abortion to lunatics in states.
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