Dr. Tarrasque

Hahah, depends on who you mean. It's definitely worked out for the folks still defending it because they know their party is increasingly unpopular. Unlikely and doing so also arms the Republicans with a free pass to do the same, should they come into power again. Let's not forget that Trump's first half of his term had the Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and the Presidency and I'm not seeing enough corrupted Democrats being voted out yet. I wouldn't put too much attention on the Republicans currently saying no to ramming a Trump appointee to the Supreme Court because in the case of Collins for example, it's an effort to mitigate the damage to her reelection that came from some of Kavanaugh's votes and if she ends up thinking that she has no hope for reelection, she may just take the L and vote with her party either out of "Party over Country" approach that the Republicans have been doing or she may just get blackmailed or something to that effect into obeying McConnell's wishes. I don't think it's about a Trump appointee getting in, it's more about what's going to happen if they go through with it, will the Republicans be sufficiently punished? In which case, you're making the GOP's return to power easier and if this is the play they're going for and it gets revealed before the election, you may just end up motivating more voters to the GOP side.

Because her seat would've been kept open too. McConnell has made it perfectly clear that his main goal is to pack the courts with conservative judges that will more likely be in favor of corporations and the rich to maintain the issues from Citizens united. That statement is just more evidence in what should've been clear to anyone paying attention: The man is an ideologue who's full of shit and will only be stopped by loss of the Senate majority, being voted out or his death.

You kind of have answered that throughout the thread: Hillary Clinton was a perfect example of the establishment that people were displeased with and she was the alternative to this clown. White folks buying into the fear and rhetoric spouted by white supremacists People thinking that his absurd behavior is an act and "typical" mud-slinging during an election and that he would behave better once in off (LMAO) Incels that agreed with that infamous quote and saw it appealing to have a non-politician running for president not caring about what he says November 3rd cannot come soon enough.

For anyone doubting this... He started taking it seriously when it was Red States that were seeing spikes and there's reports suggesting Jared Kushner's strategy was basically doing nothing because it was just the Blue states being affected. On the matter of Rand Paul being "attacked" by protesters... here's the thing... 1. Politicians are absolutely the people that should be made most uncomfortable by protests and the civil unrest going on in the country as they're literally the ones in the position to LEGISLATE and work to address the problems in the country. That is their purpose and like many of his fellow Senators, Rand Paul demonstrates that he has no interest in doing his damn job. 2. Rand Paul's record is shit and he's a hypocrite that claims to care about the deficit but voted for those ridiculous tax cuts that made it worse, he has directly played a role in decisions and policies that have negatively affected people in the country, of all colors. His party is shit and they've made use of the Southern Strategy which in turn has maintained a constant base of people hold on to their racism and exacerbate it. The removal of ANY GOP politician that has been in Congress for more than 2 terms would be beneficial as that would send a message to those stupid fucks to stop nurturing racists. 3. Rand Paul lives. He is alive to play victim and continue to conflate non-violent protesters with the violent cases to completely undermine the simple notion that black folks don't want to die for little to no reason and justice to be served when a cop does something bad. "There is no racial problem in America, we're the best. This is just an angry mob and you won't be safe until we employ fascist tactics to stop them" is effectively the kind of message politicians like him are sending with this gas lighting of their base. I don't agree with any protester going around killing people and if they do that, they should be arrested and tried just like anyone should be. I just don't have any sympathy for detrimental and corrupt politicians being verbally assaulted and feeling uncomfortable. On the COVID count... Lol it is far more likely that cases are being under-reported. Florida is likely such a case because the Governor there took Trump's words seriously and there's someone who got fired because they didn't wanna go along with some stupid ideas to make it seem like it's not that bad. There's also the fact that 57% of Republicans find the death toll "acceptable", this only encourages GOP governors to take the situation less seriously and potentially manipulate the data to save face. Additionally, since virus' death toll mostly affects poor people, often being of color, that sits just fine with the racists in the country. Now, are there cases where someone ends up dead and it is falsely being counted as a Covid death? Absolutely, but for this to actually be significant enough, you'd have to have quite a number of people to comply and keep their mouths shut about it for it to be some sort of conspiracy made to make Trump look bad like some folks suggest. That doesn't happen. Now, when it comes to the case where Governors may be manipulating data to lower the numbers? Well again, you already have officials resigning or getting fired for that shit happening as well as opposing reopening plans because that would probably be a bad idea. Violence and the racial issue is never going to end. You can only reduce the violence that comes from it by the country as a whole actively making decisions to not succumb to racist rhetoric. The US did the right thing by not voting for George Wallace but it's sad to say he is still THE most successful 3rd party candidate there has been. Crush (by voting them out) the leadership that enables the racism and defends the racists and we can move forward on the race problem.

Among the current politicians? probably not. That party needs to see extinction coming for the politicians to start actually reworking their strategy and campaigning for policy their constituents want instead of the Southern Strategy or just start a new party altogether and turn away from that strategy. Among the voters? Some might remember to turn away from the rhetoric of Trump and George Wallace. Some will pretty much just want full on fascism since the Democratic method has failed to get rid of non-whites like they want or create anything to preserve the white majority they fear losing.

There's people framing the situation with the 17 year old as him being a Patriot who stood up against the angry mob when no one else would. Defenders include Tucker Carlson from Fox News who consistently pleases the White Supremacists by making their rhetoric mainstream. The man is paid 10 million a year for effectively being a stochastic terrorist.

That's the ugly world of US politics for ya mate. Gotta use a dead black man to be able to attack a black woman without looking racist lol. And to be fair, the 2 are going to get a lot of shit about their past as they rightly should and the 2 should own up to it. It's just again... there is trash in the White House that needs to be removed.

Would've preferred Warren. Not hyped for these 2 but the fact still remains that there is trash that needs to be removed from the white house and I hope these 2 don't repeat 2016.

Gundam Wing on Toonami was my first exposure to anime. For the most part, I stopped watching because there was little that captured my interest for a while and the mainstream stuff like One Piece just has way too many episodes and I'm just not really inclined to watch TV shows anymore. I still watched Jojo Part 5 and I'll probably end up checking out whatever new Jojo part comes out simply out of curiosity to see what I missed out when I stopped on the Jojo manga in part 5.

The current state of US politics in a nutshell: Thread over. Nothing to discuss until after the election.

Would be interesting to see how long that works out. Can't imagine it holding up for too long and I think they should just change requirements for being a cop and include looking into association with extremist groups/communities as part of the background check. The only piece of interesting news as of late is that the orange turd tried floating the idea of delaying the election and has been shut down by Republicans in the senate. Oh and Herman Cain died of Covid.

Regardless, suggesting that there's no such thing as being racist towards whites is no better and only fuels the white supremacist movement which might as well be the enemy of everyone including whites that aren't racists. There's definitely instances where people go too far when they're calling others racists and things like this particular part of Reddit's recent policy changes: This is dumb and needs to be changed. I've seen talk that there's a subreddit requiring photo of a person's dark skin to join and that this particular subreddit spends most of its time just attacking whites. If this is the truth, it should be purged as well or at the very least, cut that shit out. Again, the race issue should be this simple, regardless of color/race/whatever, simply consider if you're ok with the situation being flipped. Personally, I wish folks just realized that's there's the just the human race but this isn't happening in my lifetime. I'm sure the term does suck from your perspective but that disdain is better aimed against white supremacists looking to perpetuate the advantages and disadvantages the folks of the past created and the damage they have done. "Spoiled" and "Elite" are not the words I would use to describe whites (although I've definitely seen instances where I would definitely call some spoiled) in the context of white privilege but the fact is that as divisive as that term can be, it does not exist without merit. No, I'm not suggesting that just because a person is white they're directly responsible but the fact is that it is true that there's many situations in which being white just puts you in a better situation. Efforts being made to change things like this are always being impeded by the right-wing in the country due to their aforementioned overlap with white supremacists. In Alabama, a black pregnant woman who was shot and her unborn baby died faced manslaughter charges while in Ohio a white woman was found "not guilty" despite her effectively killing her baby by burying her in the backyard. Fortunately, the charges against the black woman in Alabama were eventually dropped but that was still bullshit and a contributing factor for those charges being dropped may have been that the case caught national attention. I've seen footage of white women stopped by cops on the road just angrily chewing the cop out while Philando Castile's case exists and his killer got acquitted. If you're from a white majority country like Norway, Trump would love for you to come live in the US while for those that are Chinese are being attacked due to COVID-19 and there's the known issue of whites calling the police on black for no real reason which the younger generation has picked up that such a thing is a potential death sentence. The list goes on. The term itself is not the problem and as Shob said, changing it will just see the same people spouting talking points and pretend it's not a thing (see example #1 specifically in that video) because there's an audience for this and it makes them money. To solve a problem, it needs to be understood and acknowledged.

It's because Republican voters tend to have more affinity for Authoritarianism than they would like to admit. "Small central government" goes out the window when there's attempts at banning abortion for example. In the US, Racism discussion will always contain politics. You should read the stuff below to get a little understanding of why that is. There are many many factors that come into play for why Racism is such a prominent thing in the US and why our politics suck so much when it comes to just implementing changes that give certain folks the rights "normal" people already have. It basically boils down to the right-wing overlapping with white supremacist ideology but to provide some factors, here's 3 things 1. The modern Republican Party is literally the product of pandering to racists. It was already linked earlier but folks should really research the matter of the Southern Strategy and hear Lee Atwater's words on it. The reason why that strategy targeted white voters in the South specifically is because the South sees the history of things like the Civil War, Slavery and Who should be allowed to govern quite differently from folks in the north and so they were basically easy pickings. As a result, the party entrenched itself with racism back when it was more popular but now that they see that they're losing white voters that aren't racists and that they can't really hope to get the support of non-whites, they're hoping to look like they're trying to get rid of the stink to little success because just like Andrew Gillum told Ron DeSantis, "the racists think you're racist" and that is the case as some such groups see the party as their vessel of opportunity to gain power and there was even an actual Nazi, Arthur Jones, winning a recent primary because the party couldn't find someone to oppose him. Even though the Republican party wants to try and get rid of the white supremacist stink, they still need support from such people in conjunction with their cheating in election to maintain the party as they know they're losing. The Republican LORD AND SAVIOR, Ronald Reagan, himself was actually racist but anytime you say that in conversation with a conservative they would deny it or bring up the fact that he signed some particular bill (I forget what it was specifically) while omitting the fact that said bill couldn't be vetoed rendering that defense moot as well as ignoring the fact that when he was governor of California, he took GUN CONTROL action in response to Black Panthers patrolling the streets armed to deal with Police abusing their power... you know, that argument gun nuts make about protection against tyrannical government. Nowadays you have this audio clip and an op-ed from his daughter apologizing and you can still find Republican voters and politicians defending him on this. The Republican party in particular has just had racist leaders and the voters just keep putting in people that doesn't help them drive that stink away. There was a dude literally running for congress vowing to deport Obama to Kenya, he was still in Congress earlier this year and is now Trump's chief of staff. Nowadays the Republican party basically does nothing besides look to pass tax cuts for the rich (because the reality is that yes, our politicians are owned by them), deregulate everything and stoke fear about the "VIOLENT LEFT" to their old voters thanks to the help of... 2. Right-wing media, most prominently Fox News creating an alternate reality and the "liberal" media being soft on Republicans. If you ever wondered how it is possible that Trump was not impeached AND removed when Nixon was, here you go. For Racism specifically, just google "Advertisers flee Tucker Carlson" and you'll find results from different time periods, this usually happens when the dude runs a segment that's far beyond his usual BS. The most recent news about him is that he's the most watched cable news show. If you wonder why, it's because of his populism approach as well as being straight up white supremacist porn because he's a better voice for them than they have been. Then there's other shit like PragerU's videos trying to portray the current Democratic party as racist, their new video calling the BLM movement marxist, comparing BLM to terrorist groups, etc. They do this kind of shit all the time and it's just never gonna end until the audience wakes the fuck up and ditches them completely because when Fox News faced a lawsuit because of their lying about COVID-19, their defense was that the 1st amendment protects their lying and in another lawsuit for libel by Tucker Carlson, literally admit the guy lies to his audience. All of this ends up culminating from misinformation and mental gymnastics done strictly to protect the Republican party and it ends up making it difficult to create unity between the people's understanding of actual cases of racism occurring in the country and dumb instances of fools too recklessly calling others racist (which can often be ignored and isn't resulting in cases where the police is called on them). Then there's the "liberal" mainstream media which is often terrible at covering politics and has a habit prioritizing ratings by being soft on Republicans because the Republican voters in their audience would get mad whenever their politicians were singled out. A good example of this is when Obama spoke out about the BS shutdown in 2013 that was caused by Republicans. Obama spoke the truth here (they demanded ransom for just doing their jobs) but the mainstream media just played their "both sides" card to look neutral as always. Their constant attempts at being neutral and failure to call out Republicans being obstructionists plays to the advantage the worst politicians we have in congress such as... 3. Mitch McConnell. This man is the real winner of the 2016 election and he's capitalized on it. This is a man who loves the Citizens United outcome and believes there should be MORE money in politics even though voters on both sides hate money in politics. This is a man who continues to block vote on any legislation that does not involve benefiting the rich and takes pride in it by calling himself the Grim Reaper This is a man up for reelection this year and has predictably won with ease in his primary and is expected to win reelection. This is a man who said that Obama being president was payment for Slavery. I could go on and you may be wondering what the fuck does he have to do with racism, civil rights issues and the current BLM protests? Well everything currently, he's basically put himself in the middle of every single problem in the country due to his habit of blocking just about anything that reaches the Senate. If police reform, investigations or a bill containing efforts to deal with the issue we're seeing of police constantly killing black folks who have no business dying the way they did and no justice being delivered (as well as cops having free reign to attack non-violent protesters), the man will block it because it would most likely come from the Democrats. If a bill is made to make voting easier or improve the money in politics issue and it passes, the man has already blocked it and called it a "power grab" because the party itself currently believes that if it were easier to vote (anything besides going to a polling place for a long time during a work day), they're done. It may seem like I'm just demonizing him and technically I pretty much am, but the point is, it doesn't matter if there's any good solution passed by the House of Representatives if he's still in power and we saw from the 2 years the Republicans had total control of the government under Trump that their priorities are strictly passing tax cuts, deregulation and destroying social programs that benefit regular folks. Even if this election cycle gets rid of Trump, if this guy maintains the Senate under his control like it currently is, the current unrest and protest won't really amount to more than what has already happened and it'll all just be a cycle where at a random time you may see protests start up again and companies taking the opportunities to just cash in by pandering and little things like renaming bases/removing statues but nothing really substantial. The man CAN be persuaded but it's incredibly difficult and a point of reference to that difficulty is the situation about the benefits for the 9/11 first responders where Jon Stewart had to come into a congressional hearing to shit on congress and publicly pressure McConnell to fucking do something. McConnell is also a factor to consider for folks that don't want to look into politics and want to check out from it (I certainly want to) or put simply, those who see themselves as "apolitical" or "politically neutral". As things are currently, the choice is basically made for you when it comes to any lawmaking that improves things for regular folks/marginalized folks or tries to address things that aren't giving more money to the rich or deregulation, and that choice is "No" so long as the man maintains Senate Majority. I understand the desire to be "politically neutral" but the unfortunate reality voter apathy helps incumbents like him. TL;DR, if you want any change to come in regards to racism or simply for common sense civil rights progress to be made, the Republican party needs to be punished for its use of the Southern Strategy and continued obstruction and money in politics. The issue of race in particular, should be this simple. And for those who have read this far and just think this is me being partisan: I'm a Hispanic male with light skin that's often not thought of as Hispanic by other people (including fellow Hispanics) due to my speech and when it comes to the issues most things have no bearing on me and I would personally benefit more from Republican rule due to their penchant for Tax cuts and yet I consider myself an Independent voter. I have 2 cousins in a similar boat (but it's much much easier to tell that they're Hispanic thanks to their speech) and they both support Trump and will vote for him again. The difference between me and them is simply research of both sides vs Fox News. There's both, people who literally mean to ABOLISH and people who stop at defunding. I don't agree with the former and them being grouped with the crowd that actually means the latter are setting up the whole situation to either blow up and accomplish nothing or far less than it really should.

He's just that stupid but he also surrounds himself with elites that view common folk as "Human Capital Stock" and watches a network with someone who pretends to hate elites.

I'm aware and I wasn't trying to argue that big tech companies should be trusted but instead pointing out that they have a rule set which they're supposed to operate with and when they fuck up, they should get shit for it just like the government and any other company if they deserve it. As Johann just pointed out... It's not about trusting the tech company, it's more about pushing them to be consistent with their rules and supposed values as well as taking out the garbage from Conservatives and crazy far-left morons that deserve it. Again, Conservatives only hate option #1 here because they're being affected and that's partly due to damage they've brought upon themselves... just recall Ben Shapiro's tantrum on BBC that started from Andrew Neil referring to the Abortion policies that Conservatives in the US support as "taking us back to the dark ages", that illustrates just how some folks in the US are so convinced that they're in right that dissent from someone in their own camp but in a different country is immediately seen as the "enemy".