I'm finding it difficult to see how a Trump voter can complain about tone. Trump himself is usually toxic and abrasive, and relies heavily on petty insults with the eloquence usually found on grade school playgrounds. His followers proudly wore "fuck your feelings" on their clothing, and that seems to have been their operational philosophy ("cucks! snowflakes! get out of your safe spaces!") before they realized how much the rest of the country hated them. Now, ironically, they complain about insults and not being accepted.

With all that in mind, is it any surprise people on the Left treat Trump with zero respect? And can you not understand how ridiculous it is to demand that respect when respect has not been given by your side. From the president on down, there has been no grace, no diplomacy, no kindness. This is a classic "remove the log in your own eye before complaining about the mote in another's" situation.

And that's without getting into how this administration is the most corrupt in modern American history. Perhaps the most corrupt ever in our nation. And is intent on doing as much looting & damage as possible before they're finally kicked out. Difficult to treat someone with respect when they're behaving in such a reprehensible fashion.

I think the issue is that log goes both ways. Complaining about someone being petty and insulting rings hollow from someone being petty and insulting. It feels like a "rules for thee, none for me" situation.

Or the even worse "no bad tactics, only bad targets".

We can insult Trump because he is a bad person. Trump can't insult me because I'm a good person.

Well, who decided one was a bad person and which was a good person? You? That's not exactly unbiased. Why is Trump a bad person? Because he insults good people? But what makes those people good? Because they insult bad people? Well all you've done is put a level of abstraction between the problem of why do you get to decide who is good and who is bad? And how do you make that determination?

Trump mocks the weak, the disabled, things people can't help, things he's guilty of himself. He's self-serving, he inconsistently applies rules, favoring sycophants despite their actions and criticizing critics for doing things he ignores in his favorites. He's actively trying to avoid investigation into certain aspects of his campaign. These are all reasons he's not a good person. Because good people don't do those things.

So I don't care if you dislike Trump. If your entire discourse about him is to mock him for his appearance or call him derogatory names, then how is what you're doing any different? I wouldn't want you in charge either. And I wouldn't want anyone you vouch for in charge either.

There is the concept of being the better person. There's no point in wrestling with a pig. You'll both get muddy and the pig enjoys it.

>There is the concept of being the better person. There's no point in wrestling with a pig. You'll both get muddy and the pig enjoys it.

You're not entirely wrong, but in this case, the pigs are the ones that dragged us all into the mud, so it's understandable that some people wouldn't want to simply drown politely in the cesspool.

Would agree with you that it's semi-mainstream. I grew up evangelical, and I heard that argument many times. Though it was never accepted doctrine nor preached. At least at my baptist church.

But there is one potentially fun part of this silly theology. While discussing this with a never-Christian friend of mine, we both had the epiphany there's an overlap between this doctrine and the "universe is a simulation" idea. Which really amused me.

Maybe, at least with believers of that sort, gnosticism will make a well-deserved comeback.

I had the same problem. After years of Windows laptops, I bought a Macbook back in 2015 because I wanted a change. Ended up with the same problem. Tried all sorts of fixes. Reinstalled the OS several times. It would work for a day after the reinstall and then lock up after every sleep again. I guess it wasn't always a complete lock up. Once when I was beyond frustrated with it, I let it just sit. After 30 minutes, it came back on.

I returned it and went with a Thinkpad instead. On all my Windows laptops, sleep's never been a problem. Even on the cheap machines.

Not long after I moved to Kansas in 2012, I received a postcard supporting some tea party idiot for the legislature. Was a four color printing on thick glossy paper. Paid for by the Koch's PAC Americans for Prosperity. I kept getting these cards every other day until the primary. By comparison, the campaign materials for the other candidates were clearly run off of someone's photocopy machine.

The cards, and bigger publications, started up again before the general. This is in a small rural district. This entire process was repeated across the state and was accompanied by constant television advertising. Led to Brownback getting enough support so he could get his infamous, and disastrous, tax cuts through the previously hostile legislature. Tax cuts strongly supported by the Kochs.

2014 and 2016 saw a repeat of this advertising blitz.

When the Democrats get angry at the Kochs, it's for good reasons. When I saw AFP interfering in something as small as my tiny district, I thought it was quite creepy. Soros's funding hasn't been even remotely as large nor as pervasive.

I understand the issues around campaign finance reform but what you are describing is one of the most transparent and open activism that is imaginable. They most likely target smaller elections where it is possible to swing results just by running a decent campaign with a setup that is easily scalable and reproducable across many districts.

The FCC under Trump has been very friendly to the large enterprises at the expense of small businesses and customers. Trump himself has approved many regulatory changes which are hostile to small businesses, employees and customers across many different industries.

It's safe to say at this point that we have a clear idea of what decisions Trump and his FCC will make in the future, and that there would little to no hope for decisions which will increase competition. A year is plenty of time for assessing the character of an adminstration, and Trump's has been remarkably consistent in this regard.

It's probably both, but leaning much more towards the grifting side of things. There's something about conservative politics in the US which encourages grifters and cons.

When my very Republican stepfather fell into dementia, I helped my mom monitor his mail so he'd stop spending so much money on things he didn't understand. It was a deluge of stuff every day. Often from groups I had never heard of who wanted money to stop Sharia law or stop the "war on Christmas" or whatever the big conservative cause was that day. And even the mainstream GOP got into the act. More than once, a FedEx envelope would show up with a plea that everything was doomed unless a check was overnighted. Once the GOP FedEx solicitation contained a letter accusing my stepfather of no longer being a member of the Republican Party, but he could clear up this misunderstanding by writing a check.

A great, in-depth article on this is here:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

The conservative movement is elder abuse on a grand scale.

And on the flip side it's Donate or get deported. Scare tactics work, both sides use it.

Except the stated policy of this executive is to deport large numbers of people, whereas there is no danger of Christmas being outlawed, or of Sharia becoming the law of the land.

Certainly not. The only things keeping the official policy from progressing faster are the utter incompetence of the administration and the relative sanity of the court system. Both can change.

Using any of the start menu replacements (StartIsBack, Start10, Classic Shell) will give you the old interface and somehow gives you the old search engine too. Has the nice side effects of making Cortana completely disappear and giving you right click uninstall options for all the apps.

I'd agree with your perceived trend. Ubuntu has the right idea with the LTS releases. Microsoft had the right idea with the LTSB, but ruined it by making it limited to enterprise customers.

I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.

This does make Linux appealing to me at the moment. If a major distro changes something that bothers you, you can count on someone to fork and maintain the old way. There are trade-offs of course, but it's possible to keep you system just the way you like for a long time while still getting updates where they are important.

/r/anarchism and /r/socialism are two that often advocate violence. The latter is dominated by "tankies", which is a term for communists who love Stalin, gulags, and tanks. They frequently take a "kill 'em all" approach. They are also often mocked by other lefties on Reddit, so please don't assume their opinions are popular.

/r/anarchism is a slightly more complicated case. They do advocate violence in a "bash the fash" way. But their intended victims are often those who advocate for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other racist or misogynistic methods. Their violent earnestness is also often mocked by the rest of political Reddit.

/r/LeftWithoutEdge was a sub formed for serious discussion for lefties without resorting to violent speech. It doesn't get enough traffic so I urge any leftists / anarchists here to visit it occasionally.

Edit: I should add that one reason /r/anarchism and /r/socialism are still on Reddit is because they took the warnings of the admins seriously. /r/anarchism dialed their rhetoric back after being told they were on the verge of being banned. Most of the banned right wing subs ignored the warnings, and often doubled-down.

Kant isn't directly used in ways which oppress or abuse people. His works are generally not used as the foundation of unpleasant systems. Children are not raised to think of Kant as infallible, nor are they punished for failing to follow his dictates.

People criticize religion without extensively reading the theology because religion is a lived experience in a way that Kant isn't.