Harrison Ford - [The Falcon] Off Topic #8: Because we hope that 2021 will be a better year. - Page 4

sum1 · 12-04-2020, 09:49 AM

i think it is. I think you haven't taken in the full depth of his social, cultural, psychological and political influence.

**PhoenixRising** · 12-04-2020, 06:33 PM

He's a symptom of something, not the cause. The problems that brought about the rise of Trump existed before he even ran for president, and identity politics are what is going to ultimately destroy western civilization.

**wickedrum** · 12-04-2020, 06:59 PM

that's a bit of an extreme view

sum1 · 12-05-2020, 09:06 AM

Alex likes those.

**PhoenixRising** · 12-05-2020, 07:00 PM

I see it up close here, sum1 and Rita. This PC nonsense and woke identity politics make everyone hate each other over nonsensical bull

with people getting offended by nothing and making up phony outrages like cultural appropriation and toxic masculinity. Apparently now "whiteness" is a social disease and things like rugged individualism, rational thought, and the scientific method are considered characteristics of white privilege.

This is what they teach in critical race theory, that we're all inherently racist and our social structures must be dismantled and we must be "re-educated" to become better people. What part of this doesn't seem like Orwellian totalitarianism?

sum1 · 12-06-2020, 06:39 PM

You think there isn't stuff just as bad on the other political side? See the big picture.

And anyway, all human beings from all groups have a natural inclination towards being prejudiced against those different from them (you learn that when you're different from most people like I am), but it can and should be trained out of them. It's not whether you have prejudice or not, it's how you manage your prejudices. If you meet somebody who tells you they have no prejudices, you know you're talking to a liar. Or somebody with zero self-knowledge.

**PhoenixRising** · 12-07-2020, 03:12 PM

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Originally Posted by sum1 (View Post)

You think there isn't stuff just as bad on the other political side? See the big picture.

And anyway, all human beings from all groups have a natural inclination towards being prejudiced against those different from them (you learn that when you're different from most people like I am), but it can and should be trained out of them. It's not whether you have prejudice or not, it's how you manage your prejudices. If you meet somebody who tells you they have no prejudices, you know you're talking to a liar. Or somebody with zero self-knowledge.

First, let's remember this quote from A Clockwork Orange:

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“Choice. The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

Now, teaching people right from wrong is one thing, social engineering and conditioning is something else. Yes, there's bad stuff on the right as well, but that stuff is basically the same stuff it's always been, and it's embarrassingly obvious. It has no subtlety or nuance, it's just clumsy. The fascist wokeness on the left, on the other hand, is something relatively new, while also being rooted in a very old ideology. Puritanism, reactionaryism, Jacobin and Bolshevik mentality masquerading itself behind the veneer of social justice and civil rights. The fact that it has so thoroughly infested our academia and mainstream media clearly shows it is the far more dangerous of the two now.

**wickedrum** · 12-07-2020, 04:14 PM

giving people respect, rights and consideration is dangerous?

**PhoenixRising** · 12-07-2020, 08:10 PM

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Originally Posted by wickedrum (View Post)

giving people respect, rights and consideration is dangerous?

Rita, you know damn well that's not what it's about.

It's about crying wolf over things that are in no way offensive, racist, sexist, homophobic, or harmful in any way. You've already seen me post about the utterly ridiculous stuff the woke left has expressed outrage about, Rita, time and time again, and you repeatedly insist that this is not indicative of the Left, and I keep saying that it may not be the classical Left, as in Liberalism, but it is indicative of the modern, illiberal Left that destroys freedom of speech.

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Bill Maher: "Democrats were supposed to flip the Senate, and didn't; supposed to flip state legislators, not a one. And they lost seats in the House. In a year that was so much about making people aware of racism, their share of minority votes went down. The message to Democrats from so much of the country seems to be, 'We don't like Trump, but we still can't bring ourselves to vote for you.' If Cracker Jack was made of popcorn and dog and half the people threw out the popcorn, popcorn should want to know why. Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable, or they can ask what is it about a 'D' next to a candidate's name that makes it so toxic? Let's ask Ruben Gallego, he's a congressman from Arizona, and he was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos. He said, 'First, start by not using the term, Latinx,' which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of, and when they do, don't like it. Who likes it? Pandering white politicians, who mistake Twitter for real people, and don't get it that Latinx is like 'Fetch,' you can try to make it happen but it's never gonna.

Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger said after the election, 'If we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get ing torn apart again in 2022,' and that's a congresswoman. She was urging members not to talk about 'defunding the police.' James Clyburn agreed. 'Defund the police is killing our party,' he said. Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb says Democratic rhetoric 'needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense.' Thank you. Thank you. There, in my opinion is the crux of the problem, Democrats too often don't come across as having common sense to a huge swath of Americans. As I've said before, politics in this country is binary, you have to wear everything anyone on your side does. Republicans are the 'party of...' don't wear masks, kids in cages, lock her up, and Democrats are the 'party of...' every hypersensitive, social justice warrior, woke bull story in the news. They're the party that disappears people, or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things.

Anne Hathaway apologized last week because in her new movie she plays a witch, a fictional character that has three claw-like fingers, and that's offensive to 'people with limb differences.' *sigh* The week before, the NHL's Arizona Coyotes dropped a player after it came out in the press that when he was in eighth grade, he bullied a disabled kid. Yes, that's a bad thing to do, but are we really going after people for what they did in middle school now? Democrats already lost seats for going after what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school. Common sense! Last year I read about how NBC held an emergency meeting to determine if Mario Lopez should be fired from his job at Access Hollywood. I thought, 'Holy , did he sexually assault somebody?' No, he went on a podcast and when the host brought up the trend of liberal parents letting toddlers pick their gender identity, he said, 'My God, if you're three years old and you're saying... you think you're a boy or a girl... I just think it's dangerous as a parent to make that determination.' Cue the groveling apology, followed by America saying, 'Uhhh, yeah, I think Mario's right. Maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo-choo noises to get the food in their mouth?'

I can do this all day, cite stories big and small, that are endlessly on people's newsfeeds that add up to a constant drip-drip-drip of 'These people are nuts!' Everybody heard about that story out of San Francisco? About a guy who got on a crowded elevator with a female professor, and when she asked 'what floor?' he said, 'women's lingerie!' You know, a little joke, for which he earned a formal complaint because it left her 'shaken.' Shaken? Who are these jellyfish? Like the woman who almost derailed Biden's campaign because he kissed the back of her head before she went out to make a speech. She said, 'her brain couldn't process what was happening.' Really? Your brain couldn't process that, like string theory or wormholes? An old man was trying to show support in an old man way. She said she was 'embarrassed, shocked, confused,' well then the outside world isn't for you! And certainly running the world isn't.

I talked to a guy in the Midwest once, who told me this story about the day he went out to get his car in the supermarket parking lot, but couldn't back out, because a mother and her very young daughter were standing behind his car, which was next to their car, which had a Hillary bumper sticker on it. And the little girl was screaming at her mother, who was profusely apologizing to the child. And he said to me, 'I just can't let people like that take over this country.' That's what people vote on, not policy. Democrats kept saying in the campaign, 'you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling,' and many voters keep saying 'yes... we... can!' In fact, our primary reason for voting for him is to create a bulwark against you, because your side thinks silence is violence, and looting is not. Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses, and making everyone walk on eggshells, and replacing 'let's not see color,' with 'let's see it always and everywhere,' formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan. It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this s. Democrats need to listen to our new President-elect's old boss:"

Barack Obama: "This idea of purity and you're never compromised, and you're always politically 'woke' and all that stuff... you should get over that quickly."

sum1 · 12-08-2020, 09:08 AM

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Originally Posted by PhoenixRising (View Post)

Now, teaching people right from wrong is one thing, social engineering and conditioning is something else. Yes, there's bad stuff on the right as well, but that stuff is basically the same stuff it's always been, and it's embarrassingly obvious. It has no subtlety or nuance, it's just clumsy. The fascist wokeness on the left, on the other hand, is something relatively new, while also being rooted in a very old ideology. Puritanism, reactionaryism, Jacobin and Bolshevik mentality masquerading itself behind the veneer of social justice and civil rights. The fact that it has so thoroughly infested our academia and mainstream media clearly shows it is the far more dangerous of the two now.

No, plenty of the stuff on the right is new and not so obvious. It has thoroughly infested discourse across Western culture. I don't know, maybe you haven't been paying attention to Trump and the Alt-Right. They're insidious.

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Republicans are the 'party of...' don't wear masks, kids in cages, lock her up,

Yes, murder via spreading disease, racism and misogyny. You think that's not bad? You want to vote for those guys?

**wickedrum** · 12-08-2020, 10:21 AM

the Anne Hathaway stuff is pretty ridiculous, it's going too far and you know I don't agree with that. If it is part of a political agenda, they should indeed drop it because it is not going to get them many votes.

However, as harmful as this ideology is, it is nothing compared to pure evilness of the republican agenda where theft, ripping each other apart and promoting ignorance so they don't have to take anyone into consideration is supposed to be the driving force to progress. I really don't understand how you can think that and value one republican who's strategy is to trample over anyone for their own gain. I don't know you to be like that, so how can you identify yourself as such

To me, being called a republican is an insult, the same way as being called tory is an insult pretty much all over Scotland.

**PhoenixRising** · 12-08-2020, 06:51 PM

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Originally Posted by wickedrum (View Post)

the Anne Hathaway stuff is pretty ridiculous, it's going too far and you know I don't agree with that. If it is part of a political agenda, they should indeed drop it because it is not going to get them many votes.

However, as harmful as this ideology is, it is nothing compared to pure evilness of the republican agenda where theft, ripping each other apart and promoting ignorance so they don't have to take anyone into consideration is supposed to be the driving force to progress. I really don't understand how you can think that and value one republican who's strategy is to trample over anyone for their own gain. I don't know you to be like that, so how can you identify yourself as such

To me, being called a republican is an insult, the same way as being called tory is an insult pretty much all over Scotland.

It's not just that, Rita. Like Bill Maher, I can go on all day, citing one insane story after another. And I'm sorry, but I don't see this totalitarian ideology that is everything Orwell and Bradbury warned us about as being less dangerous than Republican politics in Washington. Democrats and Republicans have both been playing it fast and loose for decades. You think Democrats have polished halos or something? I live here and I've seen dirty deeds done dirt cheap by both parties. Also, I have family members who are Republicans, like my uncle's family. Are they supposed to be evil? My dad was a Democrat who was a fan of JFK and Bobby Kennedy, yet in the 80s he switched and became a die-hard Reagan Democrat, voting Republican in 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. Did that make my dad evil? I grew up in the Reagan era, so that's the Republicanism I'm used to, and I've also seen Democrats hip deep in corruption. If this were the 1990s I'd be on the Democrats' side when I was a Clinton supporter, but now I can't trust the Democrats to not be crazy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sum1 (View Post)

No, plenty of the stuff on the right is new and not so obvious. It has thoroughly infested discourse across Western culture. I don't know, maybe you haven't been paying attention to Trump and the Alt-Right. They're insidious.

Yes, murder via spreading disease, racism and misogyny. You think that's not bad? You want to vote for those guys?

I've been paying attention to both. I remember that psychopath Timothy McVeigh who caused the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s. He was a right wing extremist as well. I've been seeing this stuff since I was a teenager back in the 1980s and it's nothing new. The point is that the far right and alt right are all sound and no substance. They have no real power here. The Left are the ones in control of the media and academia. What about Antifa? Was it the Alt Right I saw rioting and looting? Or taking over an entire neighborhood in Seattle and turning it into an autonomous zone? Or bashing people's heads in Portland? Or accosting people in outdoor dining areas in restaurants? Or starting fires, smashing windows, and destroying people's businesses and livelihoods? Or shouting down speakers at colleges and even resorting to violence as an acceptable response to speech they don't like? Or who tells common working class people that their silence is violence, but looting and rioting are "reparations?" Are they the ones now tearing down statues of George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Francis Scott Key? Are they the ones pushing critical race theory which says that white people should live their entire lives atoning for their original sins by living with one hand tied behind their backs, a muzzle over their mouths, and walking on eggshells while hopping up and down on one foot? No, it's the left.

Now, are you talking about the alt right or the Republicans? Because that's like me equating the Democrats with the crazy woke left. Like I said, there are some that I would vote for. I voted for Obama in 2008 but then I voted for Romney in 2012. Does that make me evil? I'd vote for someone like Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley. But I can't think of one Democrat that I like right now.

sum1 · 12-09-2020, 09:00 AM

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now I can't trust the Democrats to not be crazy.

We can't rust the Republicans not to be crazy. Most of them won't even acknowledge Biden won the election. So many of them won't take proper precautions to limit spread of the virus. As we saw with Rudy Giuliani spreading the virus this past week.

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The point is that the far right and alt right are all sound and no substance. They have no real power here. The Left are the ones in control of the media and academia.

Nonsense. The far right and alt right have huge influence over the views of ordinary people. As does Trump.

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What about Antifa?

Blathering about Antifa is classic Trumpian ideology, aimed to distract people from the rightwing militias shooting people in the streets, intimidating people with their guns and trying to kidnap and kill state governors, not to mention the rightwingers who ram their cars into protesters. You've been conned and influenced. Blathering about China's role in the virus rather than Trump's role in spreading it is more of the same, as you did earlier this year, repeatedly. Trump is using you and you don't even realize it. Like I said, Trump, the alt-right, the far right, etc have huge influence over the views of ordinary people.

Antifa isn't even an organization, just an idea.

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Now, are you talking about the alt right or the Republicans? Because that's like me equating the Democrats with the crazy woke left.

Which you do all the time. Through Trump, the ideas of the Alt-right have entered the Republican mainstream.

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I'd vote for someone like Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley.

Marco Rubio is Tea Party. Tea Party are extremists.

Do you think it's the Left that's inspired the wave of white supremacist Synagogue shootings across the US and worldwide? Or the police brutality in the US against black people? Back in 2017 Trump actually made a speech to police promoting police brutality. Through his defense of the Charlottesville white supremacists, he promoted white supremacist violence against Jews, black people and Muslims in the US and worldwide. This is the thinking of the Alt-Right taking effect.

Now I'm shutting down this discussion because we all need a time out. That means any further posts about it will be edited. This is getting far too heated and needs to stop. Alex, your crusade against "woke political correctness" is once more aggravating my health problems, so I'm calling a stop. Keep this up and you'll force me off FF. I can't afford to deal with this sort of tension in an activity that's supposed to be relaxation.