I’m not sure if you’re unable / unwilling to review this string and see your error or are trolling.
@Rich, Please show me exactly where I edited out a question mark you wrote in a quote that I used in any post of mine. Please pay very, very close attention to who authored said post. If you can provide that, showing it was me who did what you accuse me of, I will take no action and will apologize. If you cannot show me proof of what you are accusing me of and continue to say I did, you will be demonstrating troll behavior and your account will be suspended.
It’s up to you.
I quoted the contradiction, I even emboldened it for you? Here it is again then:
Several posters myself included have quoted the sentence of yours that @CyberLN originally quoted, it didn’t have a question mark, and still doesn’t, you since keep quoting a different sentence, she has not lied.
I never said it was me.
Straw man fallacy, and @CyberLN did not and has not lied.
Pure rhetoric, and you are again “playing the man and not the ball”, champ, this is the very definition of ad hominem. You seem to be a very angry person, maybe take a chill pill?
Ironic that this comes after a paragraph of unsupported rhetoric from you, using pure ad hominem. You also have not quoted what you are claiming was unsupported, quelle surprise.
Nope, it assumed it, about another poster as well, you have since redirected it at me for pointing it out, and in both instances it is still attacking the person, and not the arguments posted, it was therefore ad hominem, and irrational by definition.
No it’s not wrong. I could ignore your disjointed rants for example, and call you an arrogant tosser, with a massive chip on his shoulder, this would demonstrably be true, but would still be ad hominem.
She, not he, and she did not lie, you simply quoted a different sentence to the one she did, and lied she had altered the original one, it was quoted for you several times. Though given your arrogant histrionics , I doubt anyone else will bothering as it will likely just meet more duplicitous handwaving from you.
That doesn’t link to any source, and you haven’t quoted your original claim for context. Given your behaviour I am starting to lose patience with you, and I am disinclined to bother.
Nope, you haven’t and no-one else has
Just yet another one of your lies.
What did you just say?
“Several posters myself included have quoted the sentence of yours…”
You really need a better memory if you’re going to lie
Just saying.
It’s still 100% relevant.
So you’re claiming that you know what irony is now ?
Hint: what you describe is NOT in any way ironic, even if it were true
Another glaring omission in your education.
Nope
It absolutely addressed your assertion and deduced from your ignorant stance that it was pure opinion and derived from a low level of education. And in this, am I not correct ?
Nope, it was accurately deduced from the quality (or lack thereof) of your posts.
Absolutely she did, as explained.
So are you asking for a citation that Spain was denied membership of the UN, under General Franco, because he state that Spain was not a democracy, but a military dictatorship
To rehash, and going through this forensically: Your original posting in question was #12. Screenshot, with the sentence that CyberLN quoted in the very next posting:
Here is a screenshot of CyberLN’s quoting (posting #13), with your direct reply underneath. Compare the yellow highlighted quote with the yellow highlighted quote in your posting. You’ll see they are identical, and that there was NO question mark in neither your posting or in CyberLN’s quote. Your comment about the missing question mark is marked in red. As you can see, if you can actually read and compare, there was NO question mark that was edited out. There was NO question mark in that sentence at all:
I don’t understand the obsession over the question mark.
At some point it should have been obvious that a ban was possible - even before the warning! Why continue? Why not be more productive? Why not find a way to get past the question mark and continue the discussion?
While this thread seems to have devolved into personal recrimination rather than debate, I think the OP gets at something that bugs me given the current constitutional crisis in the US. And that is that this situation didn’t just spring fully formed out of Shitler’s forehead. The foundation has been laid and the ideology advanced for probably at least 60 years now. It involves Christo-fascist fever dreams, the ruthless greed of the uber-wealthy, and abreaction to the US attempting to construct a more egalitarian, inclusive society.
Because of this, a rethinking of what kind of governance a truly free (or at least relatively free) people have is needed. In particular, I think the US founders were a little bit elitist and also naive in assuming basic decency / good actors and that OF COURSE no one would EVER do anything nefarious because the people would NEVER allow it and those who pass societal filters to take high office would always be, for lack of a better term, cultured gentlemen who would not break decorum.
I think it also needs some rethinking in view of how social media (and, now, AI) are rapidly reshaping (and arguably, rewiring) human thinking and socializing.
IF (and it’s a big if) we assume that what rises from the ashes of the current regime wants to return to substantially the American system, a lot of more specific guard rails will have to be written in and some things will have to be made easier than they are (e.g., 25th amendment, presidential impeachment – compare how South Korea handled their president’s attempt at a power grab, how much better their checks and balances worked, how much more vigorous their public and legislative responses).
I wonder what everyone else’s thoughts are on this. What should have been in place that would make the Musk/Trump regime much harder to gain office and, even in office to wield so much unaccountable power? What would we do different next time – if we live to see a next time?
To start off, I’ll offer this: a deep cultural reverence for rational thinking, facts and evidence, implemented by teaching people from early childhood how to reason, what a valid epistemology is, and how to spot logical fallacies. Critical thinking as a priority in school curricula at all levels, as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.
This would never happen in the US now because Christo-fascist parents don’t want little Johnny coming home and asking Uncomfortable Questions. (Or impertinent ones).
This implies that people are going to have to be deeply traumatized, to be disabused of their willing delusions enough to submit to inputs from actual reality. They are going to have to undergo some version of what we fundagelical deconverts went through – some high level of cognitive dissonance that would prompt them to do the unthinkable – to question their own beliefs.
This fact seems even more apparent from this side of the pond.
“In the first quarter of 2024, 8.2% of people in the United States did not have health insurance, which is about 27.1 million people. This is a significant improvement from the years before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), when 16% of the population was uninsured.”
As bad as that looks to me, it gets worse, as the fate of ACA hinges on house control of course, so the democrats better not fuck the midterms, or it will let the giant oompa loompa fuck over as many poor people in desperate need of health care as he can.
I suspect it will be difficult to do anything before the next election. But after that, my take is the following.
Reform the supreme court so that
there is a maximum age for supreme court judges, after which they have to retire from the court. 70 years sounds reasonable.
new judges are not politically appointed, but instead for example selected from a pool of applicants by an independent council.
Do something about the rampant and corrupt lobbying.
Make donations to election campaigns transparent, and disallow huge donations à la the ones from Musk.
Eliminate filibustering; I see no rational reason to allow it.
Go over the entire legislation and fix loopholes, and explicitly disallow certain changes. Or allow them, but require that it must be approved twice, with an election cycle in between.
