[Ghostavo]

Where have I supported Trump?

Do I have to put a disclaimer that I consider Trump the worst candidate every time I point out hypocrisy in the media's reaction regarding something Trump or his campaign said?

[MP-Ryan]

Meh, the Skittles analogy is terrible regardless of hypocrisy anyway.  Immigrants and refugees on the whole have far lower crime rates than the general population; introducing them into a population actually lowers the crime rate.... or in that analogy, you might have 3 poisoned skittles in your pot of 100, but you also have 900 poisoned skittles in your pot of 10 000.  903 poisoned in a pot of 10 100 is a lower rate than existed before they were introduced. (*Note:  This is not set with values for actual crime stats).

Re:  the medial care, lawyer, etc - Trump's full statement essentially railed against due process rights for citizens accused of terrorism offences if they weren't born in the US.  http://www.npr.org/2016/09/19/494633030/trump-calls-it-sad-that-n-y-bombing-suspect-gets-medical-care-lawyer  Which is... dun dun dun.... unconstitutional.

Re:  Jill Stein.  She's a hilarious nutbar whose Kryptonite is apparently Wifi.  Or GMOs.  Or vaccines. Or, apparently science generally. Does anyone take her seriously?

[Ghostavo]

Meh, the Skittles analogy is terrible regardless of hypocrisy anyway.  Immigrants and refugees on the whole have far lower crime rates than the general population; introducing them into a population actually lowers the crime rate.... or in that analogy, you might have 3 poisoned skittles in your pot of 100, but you also have 900 poisoned skittles in your pot of 10 000.  903 poisoned in a pot of 10 100 is a lower rate than existed before they were introduced. (*Note:  This is not set with values for actual crime stats).

The analogy is horrible because you can stereotype an entire group of people, either they be men or refugees, to justify anything you want.

[MP-Ryan]

I saw a good reversal on twitter earlier that applied the argument to guns and gun owners too, which I found amusing, considering Trump's current base.

[MP-Ryan]

So while we're talking about things like illegality and charitable foundations and taxes, turns out Trump appears to have illegally used large sums of money from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits and pay bills.  Oh, and make a disallowed political donation to the Florida AG who was thinking about investigating him.  Now, none of this makes any comment on the Clinton Foundation.  But there is yet one more funny little detail:  no Clinton family member presides over the Clinton Foundation.  Donald J. Trump is still the President of his foundation and works on it about half an hour per week.

[qwadtep]

Bill and Hillary are both CF board members.

How about human rights activist Bernard Sansaricq speaking about how Bill Clinton tried to bribe him when he was President of the Senate in Haiti in 1994 prior to the US-led invasion, and the continuing shady dealings of Hillary and the CF there? How about the massive money-laundering machine funding much of Hillary's campaign?

Trump's charity mishandling is troubling, but it doesn't make his opponent any better.

I saw a good reversal on twitter earlier that applied the argument to guns and gun owners too, which I found amusing, considering Trump's current base.

Gun ownership seems more like the fluoride that prevents the water supply from being contaminated by microorganisms, but that's a topic for another day.

[Bobboau]

i-it's chlorine that does that, fluoride is for your teeth.

[qwadtep]

I stand corrected.

[MP-Ryan]

Trump's charity mishandling is troubling, but it doesn't make his opponent any better.

It's a good thing no one claimed it did, then, isn't it?

And as you say, the gun issue is a topic for another day.  This thread has enough inane content as it is.

[Bryan See]

Here's the open letter on NotWhoWeAre.us, it denounces Trump's critical remarks on the US science and technology sectors.

It is noted that his stance against science and technology seems to be on the line with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he admires. Thus, both Trump and Putin are technophobes or cyberphobes.

For example, he called computers and the Internet we always use as a "mixed bag" thinks people should wean themselves off the internet and computers, becoming cyberphobic and anti-tech that will prevent humanity from achieving milestones. How dare he! I wish I hope that Elon Musk will finish the Mars Colonial Transporter mission sooner for us to escape from being mercy at Trump's tech-hating mobs.

And there's the alt-right, who is supporting Trump and is said to be a largely online movement with Internet memes widely used to advance or express its beliefs. Pepe is the icon of white-supremacist, and Donald Trump Jr. used white supremacist/neo-Nazi tweets.

Remember, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are no Ronald Reagan nor Mikhail Gorbachev. They are more like the evil-twisted John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, or both Adolf Hitlers on both sides of the Cold War.

And lastly, you might want to read Reagan's 1976 impromptu speech, which warned us about Trump and other dangers.

[MP-Ryan]

-snip-

This is the literal manifestation of "Not. Helping."

[The E]

I saw a good reversal on twitter earlier that applied the argument to guns and gun owners too, which I found amusing, considering Trump's current base.

Speaking of guns....



But remember, it's very clearly Clinton who is evil because she wants to take people's guns away. Trump just wants to take guns away from bad people, so that's okay; after all, the police is known to be absolutely fair when dealing with suspects, especially non-white ones.

[Bobboau]

That's not the evilest thing he's said, but I think it might be the stupidest.

[Ghostavo]

And there's the alt-right, who is supporting Trump and is said to be a largely online movement with Internet memes widely used to advance or express its beliefs. Pepe is the icon of white-supremacist, and Donald Trump Jr. used white supremacist/neo-Nazi tweets.

It's getting really tiring seeing this info over and over again.

Pepe is a freaking cartoon frog from Boy's Club. If Pepe is an icon of white-supremacists then the American flag is the icon of the KKK by the same token logic.

As for white supremacist/neo-Nazi tweets:

I've got to love the irony of Trump Jr. being attacked in the media for a post on Twitter comparing refugees with Skittles, when the meme started with feminists comparing men with M&Ms.

But remember, #notallmen #notallrefugees, totally different guys.

At this point I have to ask, is Bryan See a bot/troll?

[The E]

And there's the alt-right, who is supporting Trump and is said to be a largely online movement with Internet memes widely used to advance or express its beliefs. Pepe is the icon of white-supremacist, and Donald Trump Jr. used white supremacist/neo-Nazi tweets.

It's getting really tiring seeing this info over and over again.

Pepe is a freaking cartoon frog from Boy's Club. If Pepe is an icon of white-supremacists then the American flag is the icon of the KKK by the same token logic.

And the swastika is just a hindu religious symbol.

See, you're right, Pepe by itself is just a character from a cartoon. But as it happens, the alt-right use him in a very coherent way; they are, at this point in time, the only organized group using him. He is no longer just a character (just as the swastika is no longer an innocuous religious symbol) and while I suspect he won't get as infamous as the swastika, it is certainly accurate to refer to Pepe as an alt-right icon at this point.

[Ghostavo]

And there's the alt-right, who is supporting Trump and is said to be a largely online movement with Internet memes widely used to advance or express its beliefs. Pepe is the icon of white-supremacist, and Donald Trump Jr. used white supremacist/neo-Nazi tweets.

It's getting really tiring seeing this info over and over again.

Pepe is a freaking cartoon frog from Boy's Club. If Pepe is an icon of white-supremacists then the American flag is the icon of the KKK by the same token logic.

And the swastika is just a hindu religious symbol.

See, you're right, Pepe by itself is just a character from a cartoon. But as it happens, the alt-right use him in a very coherent way; they are, at this point in time, the only organized group using him. He is no longer just a character (just as the swastika is no longer an innocuous religious symbol) and while I suspect he won't get as infamous as the swastika, it is certainly accurate to refer to Pepe as an alt-right icon at this point.

Pepe is used by the entire internet, the only thing that links it to the alt-right with greater relevance is the insistence of the media.

But if you really want to go that way, we can also call Animal right's legislation and certain worker's rights legislation, Nazi legislation I guess...

Hitler liked dogs, do you like dogs? You have Hitler tastes I guess...

Trump could post the freaking red cross symbol and the media would find some way of linking it to Nazis or alt-right or something.

[Grizzly]

Trump could post the freaking red cross symbol and the media would find some way of linking it to Nazis or alt-right or something.

No, they really could not.

[Ghostavo]

Trump could post the freaking red cross symbol and the media would find some way of linking it to Nazis or alt-right or something.

No, they really could not.

They linked what is basically "a rotten apple spoils the barrel" to the Nazis for god's sake...

[The E]

Pepe is used by the entire internet, the only thing that links it to the alt-right with greater relevance is the insistence of the media.

But if you really want to go that way, we can also call Animal right's legislation and certain worker's rights legislation, Nazi legislation I guess...

Hitler liked dogs, do you like dogs? You have Hitler tastes I guess...

Don't be an idiot. No, Pepe is not used by the entire internet, just a few messageboards. In fact, I personally hadn't seen much of him (apart from him starring in a few memes) until this whole alt-right stuff started. I imagine that the same is true for a lot of people who are not clued into the whole chan meme culture; right now, it's the alt-right that make Pepe popular, not anyone else, thus calling him an alt-right icon (and I repeat myself here) is not wrong.

I made the comparison to the swastika very deliberately. It too was a symbol that (depending on culture) had a number of different meanings (with most of them obscure), until one group appropriated it for their purpose. A similar thing is happening with Pepe and the alt-right: While there's a large corpus of memes featuring that particular frog, none of them ever leaked out of the internet image board bubble. Now that a particular group inspired and formed by that bubble (the alt-right) are making their appearance on a larger stage, they are dragging their iconography (of which Pepe is a part) with them. As a result, for a lot of people, Pepe and the alt-right are now associated with each other. Claims that they shouldn't be associated because that's not what Pepe is about are ... well, they're a brand of nerdery that is irritating at best.

Symbols do not have their meaning set in stone when they are created. They change in accordance with their use, and how that use is perceived by the wider world. Once the media started to associate Pepe with the alt-right, that association became fact for a lot of people. Whatever he was before stopped mattering, just like it doesn't matter today what the original meanings of the swastika were. So, just like the people who were using the swastika correctly had to stop doing it lest they be associated with something outside of their control, you have to give up this idea that Pepe doesn't have a political meaning. He does, now. End of story.

Oh, and about that whole animal rights and workers rights thing: Please learn how to hyperbole. You aren't doing a good job of it right now. Your example with the red cross shows this: The red cross, just like the american flag, is a well-known symbol of something very specific. If anyone wants to change the meaning of it, that person has to be very very powerful and use a long campaign to do it; Pepe, as something completely unknown, doesn't need that sort of power to redefine his meaning.

[Ghostavo]

Pepe is used by the entire internet, the only thing that links it to the alt-right with greater relevance is the insistence of the media.

But if you really want to go that way, we can also call Animal right's legislation and certain worker's rights legislation, Nazi legislation I guess...

Hitler liked dogs, do you like dogs? You have Hitler tastes I guess...

Don't be an idiot. No, Pepe is not used by the entire internet, just a few messageboards. In fact, I personally hadn't seen much of him (apart from him starring in a few memes) until this whole alt-right stuff started. I imagine that the same is true for a lot of people who are not clued into the whole chan meme culture; right now, it's the alt-right that make Pepe popular, not anyone else, thus calling him an alt-right icon (and I repeat myself here) is not wrong.

The only reason for that is the focus of the media on the alt-right.

I made the comparison to the swastika very deliberately. It too was a symbol that (depending on culture) had a number of different meanings (with most of them obscure), until one group appropriated it for their purpose. A similar thing is happening with Pepe and the alt-right: While there's a large corpus of memes featuring that particular frog, none of them ever leaked out of the internet image board bubble. Now that a particular group inspired and formed by that bubble (the alt-right) are making their appearance on a larger stage, they are dragging their iconography (of which Pepe is a part) with them. As a result, for a lot of people, Pepe and the alt-right are now associated with each other. Claims that they shouldn't be associated because that's not what Pepe is about are ... well, they're a brand of nerdery that is irritating at best.

Symbols do not have their meaning set in stone when they are created. They change in accordance with their use, and how that use is perceived by the wider world. Once the media started to associate Pepe with the alt-right, that association became fact for a lot of people. Whatever he was before stopped mattering, just like it doesn't matter today what the original meanings of the swastika were. So, just like the people who were using the swastika correctly had to stop doing it lest they be associated with something outside of their control, you have to give up this idea that Pepe doesn't have a political meaning. He does, now. End of story.

Lots of people associate Hillary with corruption, I guess we'll have to deal with... oh wait.

That aside, the issue is, the swastika continues to be used in other contexts without the Nazi implication. I don't see the media accusing Indian use of the swastika, for example of, of association with the Nazis. And I don't really like the idea that a symbol is forever tarnished just because a group of people used it.

Oh, and about that whole animal rights and workers rights thing: Please learn how to hyperbole. You aren't doing a good job of it right now. Your example with the red cross shows this: The red cross, just like the american flag, is a well-known symbol of something very specific. If anyone wants to change the meaning of it, that person has to be very very powerful and use a long campaign to do it; Pepe, as something completely unknown, doesn't need that sort of power to redefine his meaning.

Again, they linked "a rotten apple spoils the barrel" to nazis, not sure how much more well known you have to get.