Fresh8686

36 minutes ago, grego said:

 

I agree with you about the voting thing, but the voting thing is tied into how some people see his protest. They don't see it as strictly police brutality against black men. They see it as a '**** America', bring down America and capitalism, bring on Marxism (and there is good reason to believe that).

 

There are reasonable criticisms of Kaep and some of these movements and actions that have nothing to do with racist motives. One can want to fix injustice, reform police and the cjs, without tearing down America or taking a stance that there is essentially a racial conspiracy. Does that make sense? I'm pooped so I'm not sure how lucid I'm coming across. 

What is the good reason to believe that?

How can one reasonably come to the conclusion that this protest is about tearing down America?

What do you mean by a racial conspiracy? Who is taking on that stance?

20 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

 

That's the pessimist in you coming out, and based on some of the stuff you've talked about in your own life doesn't shock me.  A lot of people just don't know what they're doing or why they doing it, just know they supposed to do something, and looking both ways before crossing the street then getting hit by an airplane doesn't help.  What I've found is push come to shove, a lot of people don't know what to do outside put themselves first out of fear someone won't do the same for them.  Still one of the most charitable countries on the planet anytime a natural disaster shows up.

 

But if I'm in a room of classmates, most aren't plotting my demise for their success.  I find that at work, at Redskins games, there are some f'd up people, and in a large country a small percentage adds up.  We had a good news thread not to long ago, don't know what happened to it, but my guess is we are so wrapped up in what's going wrong that we forget what's going right everyday.  I wish more people had more context to their own daily strife, we'd appreciate the struggle more.  Not everyone is like us and can say "ya this is bad, but its been way f'n worse".  And news doesn't help by spending 8 hours talking about Omorosa pretending to be Mission Impossible and taking pictures of the back of peoples chairs instead of what's going on with the Rohingya.  People say they hate being from Virginia, I tell them can you imagine not being able to come back to Virginia?  Or your entire country?

 

We've both met a lot of people, but there's a difference between being prepared for the worst of people and expecting it.  

I feel you man and you do have a point. In a neutral situation a good handful of people are decent to be around. But, in my studies and experience, when you add stress or an element of scarcity that percentage of people who will behave with principle decreases. When you add in temptation the percentage of people decreases again. When you add the removal of risk of reprisal or punishment, that percentage decreases even more. And then add tribalism and hierarchical struggle and it reduces again.

The group of people in this world who have a palate for principled behavior, fitness/resiliency to handle stress and temptation, and a full enough emotional/spiritual cup to have the will and dedication to do so over duration are of a much smaller number than people might realize. Maybe they make up 20% of the population? Holding up the rest of the world similar to the 80/20 Pareto Principle? I'm just guessing of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like 40% of people are corrupt, 40% of people are followers/undeveloped, and 20% of people keep the rest of the world from sliding back into the dark ages.

I feel like people aren't properly trained to responsibly handle power and our technological advancements give even greater degrees of leverage which increases the emotional pressure of power, increasing the curve of difficulty and the requirements for foresight/long-term vision. All we need is one person dumb enough and unhealthy enough to get their hands on a nuclear weapon and we're all ****ed. Then you've got these supposed "elites" who act like ****ing sociopaths and are so sheltered from the consequences of their actions.

That fragility in the face of such pressures bother me...  

37 minutes ago, Renegade7 said:

@Fresh8686 this is supposed to be an unpopular opinion thread, you're doing it wrong.  I agree, calm sea never made a skilled sailor.

I feel you and that thought also crossed my mind, but then again if those things really were popular we’d have a much better world than we do now. 

In reality people do everything they can to short cut the natural process and make the lives of others worse for the betterment of their own. They see not giving a **** almost like it’s a virtue. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people cant or won’t handle the pressure of taking a stand and being their own person. There are firewalls to certain parts of life that require risk and effort and tremendous stress that many people will never pass beyond

Humans are far from a finished product. We have waaaaay more evolving to do and schools should teach from a young age how bias works and how our mind will trick and distract us from dealing with things that effect it's own perceived sense of internal consistency.

Also people are way too focused on oneness or "one thing" being the solution for a given problem. They don't realize that compulsion or need is a comfort based reaction to the very real complexity and multi-dimensionality of life. We corrupt our understanding and conceptualization of reality by allowing our minds to reduce to that level of simplicity. Reality is nuanced and should not be lost to extremes.

People lack tensile/energetic fitness and spiritual fitness.  If you're hollow or corrupt or don't have integrity, you're basically a weak ass, who is so unable to handle the stress or pain of life that you take shortcuts and destroy the lives of other people to get ahead. You can't take pain and you can't handle the pressure of your own fears and appetites. If you want to be a better person, train to handle pain for the right reasons. To handle stress for something with meaning. If you don't know what having something that means something feels like, understand you have an empty cup and have to fill it, before you can feel it. You have to pay your dues, there are no short-cuts.

Also, if you only have morals or "do the right thing" in order to get to heaven or because you're afraid God will punish you, you're also a weak ass person. That kind of transactional relationship is not spirituality.  You need to develop you're internal compass and palate for what is healthy vs destructive rather than blindly follow what other people tell you is good or bad. Too many people are following rather than sensing with their internal compass and that creates a society of people who have no ****ing idea why it's vitally important to develop into a healthy and non-destructive person. 

The best things in life only come once you take on a certain shape as a person, are seen and trusted a certain way, and able to feel and experience certain things on a deep level with other people who also have put in the time and effort to be healthy people. There are no short-cuts to those experiences and realities. Why? Because when you take a short-cut you lose out on the adaptations, the changes that would occur from a result of that experience. You have literally harvested less evolution, less development and have becomes less than you potentially could have been. Don't be someone like Trump who is the manifestation of a life-time of short-cuts and shallow harvests.

3 hours ago, Chew said:

Dude, take it back....  

Continuing with Riggo's movie theme, I believe Lady in the Water is the most underrated and misunderstood movie of the 21st century.  It tears my heart out the way people **** on this film but don't appreciate the underlying themes and what the story is really about.  I'll go to my grave knowing that LitW was the greatest performance of Paul Giamatti's career.  

This dude drops the truth bombs about Lady In The Water that everyone should know:   http://you-deserve-this.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-meaning-behind-lady-in-water.html



 

I may have to check out this movie after reading that, thanks for posting it Chew.

1 minute ago, nonniey said:

So it's got to the point on this board that several posters here use and defend the radical or alt-left huh? Because there is no real disputing that is what Amy Goodman and Democracy are.  BTW why did you change your original post did you get smacked over it (and no I didn't report it).

Nope, no one said anything to me. It's a waste of my time to argue with people who are intellectually dishonest. So I policed myself and kept my review of your mental faculties to the back pages of my mental space

19 minutes ago, nonniey said:

The difference between the two is in style only. When it comes to substance just the opposite side of the same coin.

Never mind, this nonsense is a waste of my time. 

A good snippet from the above WAPO article

Quote

4:11 p.m.: Accountant: Questionable loan saved Manafort $400,000 to $500,000 in taxes

Paul Manafort likely saved between $400,000 and $500,000 in taxes after his top deputy concocted a $900,000 loan to include on his business’s 2015 tax return, one of Manafort’s accountants testified Friday.

 

Cindy Laporta said the loan reduced Manafort’s income by $900,000, and at his tax rate, that would have resulted in a nearly half-million dollar savings. The testimony is important in that it shows the financial motivation that prosecutors say Manafort had to cook the books.

 

Laporta has been perhaps the most notable witness of the trial’s fourth day, essentially admitting she went along with tax fraud by Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates. And through her testimony, prosecutors were able to show jurors documents that support their case.

 

Notably, the loan document bore what Laporta said was Manafort’s signature. That is important because defense attorneys have sought to blame financial malfeasance on Gates, and much of Laporta’s testimony has focused on her interactions with him. Manafort’s signature would link him directly to the episode.

The evidence, the mountain of a paper trail incriminating this scraggly ass dude, plus Rick Gates testifying against him will make it highly unlikely this guy gets found not guilty.

Just as important if not more than how you look is how it feels to be around you. That’s what a lot of these incels don’t get. Be a man who can create great experiences and who doesn’t feel so ****ing weird or tiring to be around and you’ll do well. 

Even the hottest guy (or girl) is just a piece of candy to move on from after the sugar high fades if the feel of being around them doesn’t offer much beyond it. 

Do your best to see and connect with the woman in front of you, practice handling sexual tension in healthy ways, and build great and substantive experiences with people, while not acting like a ****ing weirdo. 

I kind of agree with the above. I don't have much use for past religions, but spirituality needs to be a part of humanity to counter-balance the sometimes overly mechanical nature of science. To protect from a reductionism that could bleed the vibrancy and mystery from life.

Personally, I feel no conflict with the synergy between science and spirituality. I see science in the elements of that make up the sum of our parts, but spirit in the way they all dance and come together. It blows my mind and comforts me that nothing is ever absolutely created or destroyed, but instead all things shift and change or combine and separate into different shapes of life with varying levels of complexity.

God, Jesus, Horus, Osiris, Shiva... they're all different vehicles holding similar spiritual patterns at their core. I feel my spirit like a mother****er, but at the same time I hold the view that the expansion of my spirit works much like increasing electric capacitance does. I hold to the possibility of spirits and wonder if they operate on the same plane as potentiality fields, with all the limitations that occur with the varying degrees of separation that need to be bridged in order to go from potentiality to tangible physical reality (spirits housed or interconnected/enmeshed within physical form).

I don't know about whether "god has a plan" but I do know that a lot of the things people wish a God would do, won't happen because it would violate the structural integrity of the universe, the delicate balance of way more interconnected layers than humans can even conceive of. And it sucks, but those layers are way more important to keep safe than the temporal shape of a human in some given time or place.

People cry out against brutality and it can indeed be horrible, but conflict and destruction have a place in the greater harmony of life. It's just that they're healthy versions and really, really ****ty versions of it and there is a reason for that as well. The universe has to keep the potential for the full range of things like brutality or pleasure, so that the dynamics of the universe aren't limited. Difference/contrast/conflict create volatility and dynamicism, they propel and push things, creating pressure and combustion.

There is an interaction between every spectrum of life that is vital to the integrity of the universe, even if they seem really horrible at times and even if it marginalizes the importance of our current shape in the greater universe to insultingly low levels. We are both precious and not all that important at the same time and touching both sides of that truth and feeling it viscerally, rather than as an intellectual exercise can be a hard, but vital cross to bear.

haha, I'm about that volcano xl life style

37 minutes ago, Llevron said:

 

It still amazes me that men with so much power are still able to be controlled by a piece of ass. Like you create this whole persona around being able to have control of whatever you want and you give it all up for momentary pleasures. 

People make the mistake of thinking different types of power equal attraction, when at best most kinds of power just give people leverage to get sex when attraction isn't necessarily there.

I don't understand guys who think that kind of thing is worthwhile. Obligation or leverage sex is weak as **** in my book.
 

Oh lord, watching Trumps body language during all this. I'm so glad we have reporters with the balls to ask these kinds of questions.

 
Damn BBC doing a piece on Trump and his allegedly cocaine fueled parties with underage models right before he comes to London.

Edit: And here is the episode for people interested.
 

These past few months and more, dealing with the immigration issue and other things have impressed upon me the extreme difference between people who are humanists/moralists and people who are conformists.

A lot of Republicans masquerade as moralists, but in reality they are conformists. People who are about blindly following the rules and punishing those who don't regardless of whether or not the rule violates human decency or whether or not the severity of punishment is warranted.

These same people can also be the most amoral, when there are no rules in place or when they are in the position to make the rules. These are the people who will follow any kind of order, no matter how heinous, from a recognized authority figure. They are also the ones will abuse and harm others with no qualms as long as those others are placed into a category that an authority has deemed "undesirable".

It's like they have a very weak, internalized connection to the swathe of emotions that coincide with humanity and instead operate from a fear/punishment/hierarchy based system as their main motivator and method of discernment before making a choice. There isn't a primary layer for them that decides whether a thing is right or wrong spiritually, but instead a single shallow layer that decides whether a thing is or isn't against the rules for their given station. They miss that first step, because they haven't exercised and developed the practice of making choices weighed against that spiritual guidance system.

Now of course there are degrees and extremes within a conformist spectrum, not all are the same breed. But, they are a strange breed and knowing how they operate will help a person when deciding who to depend on and allow into their lives.

 

2 minutes ago, Kilmer17 said:

Has anyone offered a legit plan of action the Dems can take to stop confirmation?  

Seems to be centered around protecting Red State Democrats and focusing political pressure on Murkowski and Collins. Other than that, procedural stalling tactics to push it till after the midterms. At least from what I've read.

Ha, Ellis was the judge in my federal case. He's tough, but fair. I was worried before going up in front of him. He gave the dude that went before me Life+90.

Man if I were the democrats I'd be pushing for marches and grassroots pressure out the ass from women and mutually concerned groups in Murkowski and Collin's home states. Actually same thing for Manchin and Doug Jones. I'd be reviewing which corporations have HQ's or significant investments in their home states and pressuring the hell out of them too.

Pressure them morally with high volume voter demonstrations against hard-line SCOTUS appointee choices and pressure them financially by pushing corporations to make a moral choice or deal with the boycotting of their brand.

The play here isn't to get them to stop choosing a nominee, but to counterbalance the choice so it's a conservative moderate rather than an ideologue.

19 minutes ago, Spaceman Spiff said:

 

Well, if I can be clear here, I'm not buying or selling shirts for hanging the media, I don't cheer when Trump harangues the media over and over.  I don't accept violence towards the media.

 

My official stance is that I work hard each day, like a lot of people.  We've all got things to deal with outside of work too and at the end of the day, I'm tired.  I'd like to be able to flip on the news or read something online and get caught up but it's hard when you don't trust the outlets.  After work is done, I don't need to be on an Indiana Jones style fact finding mission to figure out what the truth is.  I certainly don't want to listen to the talking head yell-fests on any of the networks.  Hannity can **** all the way off.  My dad watches Fox all the time, it's infuriating.  People confuse that with journalism and news. 

 

I do like Shepard Smith.  The rest of the names I'll check out.  

Sorry man, it wasn't my intention to say you were one of those types. I should have clarified that a little more and I definitely get what you mean about coming home and not wanting to hear the yell-fests and scare-tactics they use to hook an audience.

If we want to parse things, we can at least agree that these people like Trump are creating or contributing to a climate that validates and approves of violence towards the media. People sell shirts about hanging the media, Trump validates videos of him body-slamming the CNN logo and harangues the media over and over again. Dictators in other countries are using his fake news playbook and sanctioning the murder/assasination of reporters in their country (Duterte for example).

This climate has escalated and intensified in the past two years. I think people are underestimating the acceptance violence towards the media gets from certain groups of people, now that their President is leading the charge.

Do people on here feel the same way towards the media as Spiff?

For me I respect people like Ari Melber and what I've seen of Shepard Smith because you can see them in real time putting in effort to remain balanced and hold to some journalistic principle. Then there are investigative journalists who do a damn good job and vet their sources and assertions like David Fahrenthold. I also appreciate people who challenge this administration like Katy Tur and Jim Acosta, while disliking the talking head yell-fests on CNN. I guess my point is, the media isn't a monolith and I wonder if the people who have so much vitriol for the media are being somewhat influenced by the culture they're a part of that has this monolithic disdain for them.
 

6 hours ago, visionary said:

 

So the only way to get Fox to step up and improve their behavior is to influence their corporate sponsors.

Good job David Hogan. Keep hitting them in the pocket, because appealing to their morals and sense of decency ain't moving the needle for ****.